tag:blog.hasmanythrough.com,2006-02-27:/tag/railsconf2008has_many :through - railsconf20082008-06-06T09:57:02-07:00tag:blog.hasmanythrough.com,2006-02-27:Article/1132008-06-06T09:57:02-07:002008-06-06T09:57:02-07:00me me me!Josh Susser<p>I'm finally recovered from RailsConf. Wish I could say the same thing for my car, which seems to have gone into a major funk from being ignored so much. Anyway, it's been cool reading all the aftermath posts and seeing people's thoughts and analysis of the conf. MagLev seems to be getting a lot of the attention, and I'm eager to see how things develop with it.</p>
<p>If you missed me at the conf, or saw me but just can't get enough of me, here's some links to a couple interviews people did with me there.</p>
<p>Gregg Pollack did some very nice video spots with many of the conf speakers. His <a href="http://railsenvy.com/2008/6/2/Railsconf-videos">RailsConf in 36 Minutes</a> video is great. If you don't want to watch the whole thing (but why wouldn't you?), he posted the <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/1104776">interview with me</a> separately too.</p>
<p>Fabio Akita did some great <a href="http://www.akitaonrails.com/2008/6/5/railsconf-2008-brazil-rails-podcast-special-edition">podcast interviews at RailsConf</a>. You can <a href="http://download.podcast.rubyonrails.pro.br/RailsPodcastBrasil_019_08_JoshSusser.mp3">grab mine directly</a> too.</p>
<p>As I said in my chat with Fabio, the next thing I'm going to do is release the Teldra code on GitHub. Stay tuned, it shouldn't be too long now.</p>
<p>Happy Friday!</p><p>I'm finally recovered from RailsConf. Wish I could say the same thing for my car, which seems to have gone into a major funk from being ignored so much. Anyway, it's been cool reading all the aftermath posts and seeing people's thoughts and analysis of the conf. MagLev seems to be getting a lot of the attention, and I'm eager to see how things develop with it.</p>
<p>If you missed me at the conf, or saw me but just can't get enough of me, here's some links to a couple interviews people did with me there.</p>
<p>Gregg Pollack did some very nice video spots with many of the conf speakers. His <a href="http://railsenvy.com/2008/6/2/Railsconf-videos">RailsConf in 36 Minutes</a> video is great. If you don't want to watch the whole thing (but why wouldn't you?), he posted the <a href="http://www.vimeo.com/1104776">interview with me</a> separately too.</p>
<p>Fabio Akita did some great <a href="http://www.akitaonrails.com/2008/6/5/railsconf-2008-brazil-rails-podcast-special-edition">podcast interviews at RailsConf</a>. You can <a href="http://download.podcast.rubyonrails.pro.br/RailsPodcastBrasil_019_08_JoshSusser.mp3">grab mine directly</a> too.</p>
<p>As I said in my chat with Fabio, the next thing I'm going to do is release the Teldra code on GitHub. Stay tuned, it shouldn't be too long now.</p>
<p>Happy Friday!</p>tag:blog.hasmanythrough.com,2006-02-27:Article/1122008-06-01T15:19:55-07:002008-06-01T18:05:26-07:00The Great Test Framework Dance-offJosh Susser<p>Got my RailsConf talk done yesterday. Seems to have gone over well, though my slides didn't show color well in the brightly lit room so they turned the lights down all the way to see them better and I ended up doing the talk as a ghost story for half of it. Guess I have to revise my rules for slide creation to account for ambient light.</p>
<p>Anyway, I have a PDF of the slides posted: <a href="http://hasmanythrough.com/gtfdo/">The Great Test Framework Dance-off</a>. I've also opened up the example code and tests on github as the <a href="http://github.com/joshsusser/teldra_prime">teldra_prime</a> project. That project is based on the application that runs this blog, but you should probably avoid deploying it to run your own blog. I'll be releasing the Teldra blog software as its own project very soon, and that will be the project where I continue development and people can contribute changes.</p>
<p>Also, it turns out I have a craaaaazy fan. Here's <a href="http://blog.almostaspacegame.com/2008/06/01/susser-rox-fanboy-silliness.html">a picture of us</a> at the end of the talk, me posing with his ballpoint tattoo of me on his bicep. Yes, somebody drew picture of me on his body! That so beats people introducing themselves at the urinal!</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> Alright, it turns out there is a way to significantly simplify the <code>be_sorted</code> custom matcher I showed as an example for extending RSpec. <a href="http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/">David Chelimsky</a> sent me this alternate implementation that uses the <code>simple_matcher</code> helper:</p>
<pre><code>def be_sorted
return simple_matcher("a sorted list") do |actual|
actual.sort == actual
end
end
</code></pre>
<p>That doesn't have all the power of the example I gave, but it is pretty much equivalent in operation to the test/unit example I gave and said was so much easier to write than one in RSpec. Nice one, David.</p><p>Got my RailsConf talk done yesterday. Seems to have gone over well, though my slides didn't show color well in the brightly lit room so they turned the lights down all the way to see them better and I ended up doing the talk as a ghost story for half of it. Guess I have to revise my rules for slide creation to account for ambient light.</p>
<p>Anyway, I have a PDF of the slides posted: <a href="http://hasmanythrough.com/gtfdo/">The Great Test Framework Dance-off</a>. I've also opened up the example code and tests on github as the <a href="http://github.com/joshsusser/teldra_prime">teldra_prime</a> project. That project is based on the application that runs this blog, but you should probably avoid deploying it to run your own blog. I'll be releasing the Teldra blog software as its own project very soon, and that will be the project where I continue development and people can contribute changes.</p>
<p>Also, it turns out I have a craaaaazy fan. Here's <a href="http://blog.almostaspacegame.com/2008/06/01/susser-rox-fanboy-silliness.html">a picture of us</a> at the end of the talk, me posing with his ballpoint tattoo of me on his bicep. Yes, somebody drew picture of me on his body! That so beats people introducing themselves at the urinal!</p>
<p><strong>UPDATE:</strong> Alright, it turns out there is a way to significantly simplify the <code>be_sorted</code> custom matcher I showed as an example for extending RSpec. <a href="http://blog.davidchelimsky.net/">David Chelimsky</a> sent me this alternate implementation that uses the <code>simple_matcher</code> helper:</p>
<pre><code>def be_sorted
return simple_matcher("a sorted list") do |actual|
actual.sort == actual
end
end
</code></pre>
<p>That doesn't have all the power of the example I gave, but it is pretty much equivalent in operation to the test/unit example I gave and said was so much easier to write than one in RSpec. Nice one, David.</p>tag:blog.hasmanythrough.com,2006-02-27:Article/1112008-05-31T08:02:41-07:002008-06-06T09:57:26-07:00Quick RailsConf UpdateJosh Susser<p><a href="http://drnicwilliams.com/">DrNic</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/drnic/statuses/823963034">complained</a> about the lack of blogging from RailsConf, so here's a quick little update with some highlights. It's still early here and I have to get to breakfast soon, so I have to be brief.</p>
<p>First impression: lots of people. Second impression: "they want us all to fit in there?"</p>
<p>I called it exactly right. Joel Spolsky tried to pull a Ze Frank and did some random crazy presentation in his keynote, but it fell pretty flat. It was really polished and fairly amusing, but I was often insulted by either his blatantly sexist attempts at humor or his estimation of the audience's intelligence. It was nearly entirely content-free, and while he tried to develop a theme about the importance of esthetics, he never went anywhere with it. If you missed it, count yourself lucky.</p>
<p>On the other hand, <a href="http://loudthinking.com/">David Heinemeier Hanson</a> did a keynote where he transformed himself from a technologist into a life coach. His talk on <em>The Great Surplus</em> was interesting, if only to get a glimpse of the world from his perspective. I think most of what he said was right on, especially the bit about how everyone should code less and sleep more.</p>
<p>One of his points was his expectation about how Rails might lose its productivity advantage. He said there were three options: 1) Mainstream tech copies Rails' good points, 2) A radically new tech outdoes Rails, and 3) Rails becomes mainstream so there is no longer an advantage. But I think there is a 4th option. It's what happened to Smalltalk. I'm talking about C++. We Smalltalkers used to think the advantages of our language were so significant that it would take over the world. We had a huge productivity advantage over C coders. Then C++ came along and gave C coders just enough to let them improve their productivity and their ability to write larger more complex systems. It still wasn't as good as Smalltalk, but it was <em>better</em> than C, and much more accessible to most programmers than Smalltalk. C++ eventually sucked up all the oxygen and Smalltalk is now only a language for hobbyists and the occasional programming god. I think this is the most likely threat to the Rails surplus, that C# or Scala or something can do a good enough job that people can double their productivity with far less of a change in mindset or tools, and eventually no one will care about the ten times (or whatever) productivity of Rails. "Good enough is good enough."</p>
<p>Last bit before I gotta run. I've heard rumors about <a href="http://ruby.gemstone.com/">MagLev</a> for a while, and the early <a href="http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/maglev-gemstone-builds-ruby">announcement</a> last month got me really excited. The demo and discussion yesterday by Avi Bryant and Bob Walker was one of those jaw-droppers that had everyone in the room freaking out. What they showed was pretty spectacular, though I always like to keep in mind Lansford's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." The staggering performance boost together with the scalability and seamless integration of persistence could be a serious game-changer. I think the GemStone OODB technology beats the pants off of the ORM approach for most web applications, and if they can pull this off it's going to have a huge impact on how I write my software.</p>
<p>I'm giving my talk today at 4:25pm. Yes, I still freak out about giving talks. As critical as I can be of others, I'm hardest on myself. I hope I don't give myself too lousy a review when I'm done, heh.</p><p><a href="http://drnicwilliams.com/">DrNic</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/drnic/statuses/823963034">complained</a> about the lack of blogging from RailsConf, so here's a quick little update with some highlights. It's still early here and I have to get to breakfast soon, so I have to be brief.</p>
<p>First impression: lots of people. Second impression: "they want us all to fit in there?"</p>
<p>I called it exactly right. Joel Spolsky tried to pull a Ze Frank and did some random crazy presentation in his keynote, but it fell pretty flat. It was really polished and fairly amusing, but I was often insulted by either his blatantly sexist attempts at humor or his estimation of the audience's intelligence. It was nearly entirely content-free, and while he tried to develop a theme about the importance of esthetics, he never went anywhere with it. If you missed it, count yourself lucky.</p>
<p>On the other hand, <a href="http://loudthinking.com/">David Heinemeier Hanson</a> did a keynote where he transformed himself from a technologist into a life coach. His talk on <em>The Great Surplus</em> was interesting, if only to get a glimpse of the world from his perspective. I think most of what he said was right on, especially the bit about how everyone should code less and sleep more.</p>
<p>One of his points was his expectation about how Rails might lose its productivity advantage. He said there were three options: 1) Mainstream tech copies Rails' good points, 2) A radically new tech outdoes Rails, and 3) Rails becomes mainstream so there is no longer an advantage. But I think there is a 4th option. It's what happened to Smalltalk. I'm talking about C++. We Smalltalkers used to think the advantages of our language were so significant that it would take over the world. We had a huge productivity advantage over C coders. Then C++ came along and gave C coders just enough to let them improve their productivity and their ability to write larger more complex systems. It still wasn't as good as Smalltalk, but it was <em>better</em> than C, and much more accessible to most programmers than Smalltalk. C++ eventually sucked up all the oxygen and Smalltalk is now only a language for hobbyists and the occasional programming god. I think this is the most likely threat to the Rails surplus, that C# or Scala or something can do a good enough job that people can double their productivity with far less of a change in mindset or tools, and eventually no one will care about the ten times (or whatever) productivity of Rails. "Good enough is good enough."</p>
<p>Last bit before I gotta run. I've heard rumors about <a href="http://ruby.gemstone.com/">MagLev</a> for a while, and the early <a href="http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/04/maglev-gemstone-builds-ruby">announcement</a> last month got me really excited. The demo and discussion yesterday by Avi Bryant and Bob Walker was one of those jaw-droppers that had everyone in the room freaking out. What they showed was pretty spectacular, though I always like to keep in mind Lansford's Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo." The staggering performance boost together with the scalability and seamless integration of persistence could be a serious game-changer. I think the GemStone OODB technology beats the pants off of the ORM approach for most web applications, and if they can pull this off it's going to have a huge impact on how I write my software.</p>
<p>I'm giving my talk today at 4:25pm. Yes, I still freak out about giving talks. As critical as I can be of others, I'm hardest on myself. I hope I don't give myself too lousy a review when I'm done, heh.</p>