Unruly Rambling - ruby tag

My hiatus

Tue, 28 Jun 2005 13:40:58 GMT

Well it has been a long while since I last posted a blog entry, 54 days to be exact. A lot has happened in that timeframe. On a technical level, I'm in the process of dumping my current website which is written as a model 1 JSP app and moving over to Tapestry. I have the shell created but the hard work is still to come. I think I'm going to scale it back since most of the pages that are currently out there are not even interesting to me :)

On the Ruby front, I've been involved with the St Louis Ruby User Group for about 3 months now. The 3rd formal meeting is tonight. Hopefully I'll have more time to dive in soon.

On a personal level, our first child, Alex, was born June 1st so the past 4 weeks have been a whirlwind. It is an awesome experience but very time consuming. Things like learning Ruby and redesigning my site have been put on the back burner. Hopefully now that Alex is sleeping more I will have additional spare time to work on those things. Fall/Winter have always been my most productive seasons anyway since summer tends to be nonstop.

Gateway Software Symposium - Day 1

Sat, 19 Mar 2005 14:01:21 GMT

As with every other year, I started off the event with a predetermined list of which sessions that I would attend. Only time will tell if this list will remain accurate. Typically I tend to stray off and see other sessions, spur of the moment.

Classloading in Java - Building Dynamic Systems Without Pain Sessions 1 & 2
By: Stuart Halloway
Part 1 of this presentation was the same one gave last year, but since there wasn't much else at this timeslot, I ended up repeating part 1. As always, Stuart's presentation was given with much energy and most importantly with IDEA on the screen half of the time. I'm not a big fan of the PowerPoint only presentations. Most of what was covered was above the virtual machine layer but below the application layer. The difference between explicit and implicit classloaders was expounded upon. The way certain applications like JUnit, ANT, and just about every application server violate the classloader delegation rule was discussed in depth. All in all it was a session all Java Programmers should see.

Ruby for Java Programmers
By: Dave Thomas
Since I've been interested in Ruby lately, I figured I'd give Dave Thomas's talk a shot. I'm glad I did and now I'm even more eager for the Ruby group to get productive. Dave was his usual entertaining self walking around in his socks and never running out of puns. In this talk, Dave covered some basic syntax that probably seemed bizarre to most people, I know it was the first time I came across it. Other things that were covered included, writing some code to pull web service data from Amazon to show book rankings. He had to mock up the Amazon web service since there was no internet connectivity. The final demonstration was storing this web service data into a mysql database using ActiveRecord.

Dinner was served around 6:30 and Dave Thomas's Keynote address followed. As with last year, there were not many food choices that were Lent aware, so I stuck with potatoes and bread. Oh well, no big deal. At Dave's keynote, the topic was the Art of Programming. Similarities between Art and Engineering were discussed. Concepts such as modularity were discussed in the context of writing software and how Michael Angelo painted the Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Both are made attainable by a divide and conquer mentality of breaking large tasks into small sub tasks. Other trials and tribulations of his work experience were touched upon. Several funny situations were discussed that i could not do justice for here so I won't even try. All in all, the Keynote rocked!

St. Louis Ruby User Group

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 15:34:28 GMT

Last night was the official kick off of the St. Louis Ruby User Group. The kickoff meeting was held at Regatta Bar and Grill on Maryville Centre Drive where our small group had dinner with Pragmatic Dave Thomas. The focus of the last nights meeting was to come up with an approach or plan for the group. There were several ideas kicked around but nothing set in stone. Our group ranges from zero Ruby experience to fairly proficient. I'm one of the zero guys :)

Thanks to Curt Hibbs for making this happen and to Dave Holsclaw for assuming the organizer role to see that the rubber meets the road. I look forward to participating in this group.