Top Right Quadrant

Posted at 22:45 on Tuesday, 30 March 2010

RUBY Yesterday I returned from an action-packed long-weekend in Edinburgh for the 2010 Scottish Ruby Conference. These are just my thoughts on the event.

Marred only by a persisting backache, the result of typical Travelodge hospitality; and mostly predictably chilly weather, SRC was the most fun and inspirational experience I’ve had in a long time. There was a wide array of high quality talks, and perhaps some that could have used a little refinement.

It all started last Thursday, when I got to an awesomely foggy Edinburgh and I decided to put out on the attendee mailing list a call-to-arms directed at a local eatery — The Pickled Green, which just happens to be a modern Scottish restaurant with good food, good service and very agreeable prices although less-than-agreeable furniture. Two full, large tables of rubyists showed up which was a fantastic opportunity to introduce each other and have some great conversation. Luckily, since I was also there with my girlfriend, topics did divert occasionally from procs and gems.

Day One

I entered the venue, registered and then gawked at the lovely decor of the Royal College of Physicians (see photos, link in footnote).

The first day of the event began with an introduction from the organisers and the first keynote from the renowned Jim Weirich — who, by the way, is a lot more Wozniak-esque than I would have thought. As you might expect, he gave a witty and insightful talk about his experience working through the first few chapters of SICP (aka. The Wizard Book), although not without a half-hour particle physics lecture beforehand. An energetic way to loosen the brain for the rest of the event.

Based on the track I followed (although there were loads of talks I wanted to attend that conflicted with others), the first day evolved into talks on scaling BDD using Cucumber (Joseph Wilk); a lively talk on mocking, with plenty of audience participation (Brian Marick); and a dry, yet in-depth session on teaching programming to children (Bruce Scharlau).

The talk I was looking forward to the most, bar the keynotes, was the session on IronRuby from author Ivan Porto Carrero. Since you obviously subscribe to my blog’s RSS feed, you’ll know that this (using the Ruby language with the .NET framework) is something I am heavily interested in. Unfortunately, I was kind of disappointed with Ivan’s talk. The content was great, but technical problems prohibited him from really answering the question – through demonstration – that I’m sure was in everybody’s head:

“What’s so great about IronRuby?”

Something I hope to demystify with a 3^rd article in my IronRuby series soon. He had some fantastic things to say, if only the gods of technology had allowed it. Anyway, Eric Nelson and I took the opportunity after this talk to give out some books on the subject and solidify the idea with those who were interested.

Following that, a session on Arduino and Ruby from Martin Evans (remember my Arduino project?) and concluded the first day with a talk that I absolutely loved from Scribd.com’s Tyler McMullen. Tyler’s talk included some incredibly creative audience participation involving the audience installing a gem on their laptops which, upon invocation, would connect to his machine and essentially act as a server farm for a demo Rails application. This innovative stunt did the job of illustrating the advantages of a distributed architecture, and was kinda fun too.

Day Two

Saturday began, after starting the day right with coffee and shortbread, with an equally great keynote from Google’s Tim Bray on where the Ruby language currently isn’t; specifically in enterprise IT, concurrency and the mobile-space (and even gave away some Nexus Ones as an incentive to implement Ruby on Android).

I proceeded to another talk from one of the Scribd.com team, Tim Morgan on how to break a Rails website (not that I need training in that arena); Gwyn Morfey telling me to write bad code and the dudes from Exceptional giving me stats and explanations of the worst mistakes people make in their Rails apps — an inspirational morning, as you can glean from the talk titles (actually that last talk was a great idea).

From lunch to Elise Huard’s session on how to “rate” a Rails application, from the perspective of evaluating a product for possible acquisition; and finally “You’re doing it wrong!” from ex-Thoughtbotter Tammer Saleh. The latter was especially engrossing. The dude’s a fantastic speaker and the session was entirely coherent throughout.

The formal event ended with a short dramatic presentation from Jim Weirich and Joe O’Brien wherein the two took up the roles of business manager and developer in an epic struggle to bring Ruby into their day-to-day operations. This was followed by a 30 minute talk and Q&A session but I’m not gonna lie: I was mentally wiped out by that point. The after-party that evening was held in the same location, the opulent Royal College of Physicians. Alcohol, traditional Scottish dance performances and sword-fighting demonstrations from hairy, crass Scotsmen – what better way to end an intensely intellectual few days?

Edu-fatigue and the natural agony of travelling anywhere further than “down the road” aside, this was a true example of like-minded folk getting together and having a great time, involved conversation and more than a few beers at the end of it. I absolutely look forward to attending next year, in a less official capacity, and seeing some of the awesome people I met there again.

As a side note, it was very disappointing to me and most of the other attendees that one of the organisers had his iPhone stolen while it was charging. As much as I want to believe this wasn’t the doing of one of the delegates, it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be. Anyway, a frown was turned upside-down when attendees banded together to donate money to replace the stolen device — something which just warms my heart and further calcifies the idea that the Ruby community really is just an all-round friendly bunch.

Links:

• Scottish Ruby Conference
• Flickr Pool
• IronRuby

Photo by the wonderful Frasier Speirs — make sure you check out all of his snaps from the event!

Posted at 22:16 on Saturday, 20 March 2010

UNCLASSIFIED As do many other people who are very well aware of their guaranteed demise, I have penned a bucket list.

In case you haven’t heard the term before, a bucket list is an enumeration of things you want to do before you ‘kick the bucket’ — die. Their purpose is, like the common tradition of writing your ideal obituary for yourself, to give you some direction in life. I’m a man of actionable goals, hence my perpetual effort to make myself more productive, so I guess a list like that will do me some good.

I give you my bucket list, in no particular order, as of the time of posting. If I have anything going for me, it’s my determination to see things to the end. And to that end I promise you, as well as myself, I will check off every item on this list before I regret it.

1. Learn Japanese.
2. Visit Antartica, photograph penguins on their famous “march”.
3. Travel across China, visit some of the famous tea plantations.
4. Move to Silicon Valley.
5. Open my own tea shop — the authentic, oriental kind (Something to do when I retire, perhaps)

These lists aren’t meant to be about achievability, or the ability to (as subjective as the term is) ‘live life to the fullest’. It’s about what would make you really happy — aside from the standard “start a family” mundanity, I guess :-).

Posted at 16:25 on Wednesday, 10 March 2010

PROGRAMMING

SEX!

Now that I’ve got your attention, lets talk about IronRuby and WPF. Allow me divert your attention to another guest post I wrote for Eric Nelson, an architect and platform evangelist here at Microsoft.

You may recall about a week ago I wrote a a brief introduction to IronRuby, introducing some of the concepts, addressing the advantages of building with the .NET Framework and briefly talking about running pre-existing code with it to demonstrate compatibility. This time, I’ve taken it a bit further and gone through writing an application from the ground up — this time using WPF, the .NET libraries responsible for drawing awesome graphics, UIs and animations. On top of this, I’ve elaborated a bit on interoperability with the CLR.

This sample app I’ve built is what I consider the ‘hello, world’ of WPF applications — well, perhaps simply printing “hello, world” on the screen would be more apt, maybe this is more of a “bonjour, tout le monde” — an analogue clock face. A very simple data visualisation we’re all very familiar with.

Anyway I hope you enjoy the article, and if you happen to be attending the Scottish Ruby Conference later this month, please go ahead and pay Eric and I a visit. We’ll be happy to talk further on the topics of IronRuby, .NET, Ruby in general and maybe even Azure — more on that hopefully in a later post.

That link again is:

• Using IronRuby and .NET to produce the ‘Hello World of WPF’

Posted at 14:43 on Friday, 05 March 2010

TECHNOLOGY It’s not like me to dedicate an entire blog post to the purpose of promoting a link to some other site – like so many other bloggers seem to do – but this one definitely needed some shout-outs.

As an ardent theoretical¹ futurist, and someone who reads quite a lot (especially during the commute to and from work), I’ve long been predicting the severe crippling, if not complete demise of printed media — with the exception of the odd sentimental item or work of historical importance.

Craig Mod has penned a fantastic essay about how the iPad, and I’m sure generations of future tablet computers, will finally give us the alternative to the cheap paperback. He also peppers his article with some great fundamentals of content design and information architecture theory which will appeal to the budding designers out there – some theory that will appeal to web designers too and is directly analogous to the presentation/data layer split in a web page’s architecture.

It’s great to see these points that I’ve been trying to make for so long be put forward so much eloquently than I have been able to.

Ironically, I really want to print it. Read it here:

Books in the Age of the iPad by Craig Mod.

¹ ‘Theoretical’ because I can’t afford everything I want to.

Posted at 10:13 on Thursday, 04 March 2010 — with 1 comment.

RUBY I recently wrote a guest post for the blog of Eric Nelson, one our architects here at Microsoft — whom, by the way, I will be accompanying at the Scottish Ruby Conference later this month, more on that later — briefly introducing IronRuby, the implementation of Ruby running atop the .NET framework. In this piece I also touch on how to get IronRuby powering your Rails applications, but it’s fairly compatible across the board so there wasn’t much to say about that. :-)

That post can be found here, and if you’re at all interested in Rails, .NET or Ruby on Windows I recommend giving it a read. I will be following it up with one or two more articles before the conference on the topics of WPF, the rich-media component of the .NET framework; perhaps IronRuby with the ASP.NET MVC Framework for those interested in expanding their Ruby-based web development repertoire beyond Rails; and of course some elaboration on how IronRuby works and how you can better interoperate with your .NET code and the framework as a whole.

If any of this sparks your interest (and why wouldn’t it?), and you’re heading to the Scottish Ruby Conference from the 26^th to the 27^th of March 2010 — or, indeed, going to either of the charity tutorials the day before (more info here) — and would like to talk about anything IronRuby, I’d be more than happy to have a chat.

It’s very possible that we will be running a small, informal session during the conference for those that would really like to learn more and discuss the project. If that does happen, we’d love to invite any interested people along. Watch this space for more information on that.

Keep an eye out for Eric and I at the conference!

That link again:

• What’s IronRuby, and how do I put it on Rails?