Jeremy Durham

Will someone please rewrite FPDI in Ruby? Thanks.

Coming soon for all you PHP programmers…

I’m testing out Litespeed here instead of Mongrel, possibly permanently? We’ll see…

Although Jamie pointed this out a few weeks ago, I forgot to mention it. In their own words, ridiculously easy distributed programming in Ruby. Check it out

RC1 is out today. Now to get back up to speed on the new stuff.

In February, I took a few days and wrote up a quick app that organized the API into categories, added commenting ability, related methods, and managed to write a scraper for all the data in a few hours. I even enlisted the help of the amazing Masuga Design.

Well, after looking over the code and what’s there, I’ve decided to clean it up this week and push the site out. It’s sorta like PHP commenting for Rails. I’m going to extract some of the code from some projects I’ve been involved in to use as real-world examples.

Look for it soon, www.railsapi.org or www.railsapi.com

Evan Weaver recently produced bleakhouse for finding memory leaks in your Rails apps. I know a few people who could benefit from this. It even looks pretty! Go check it out, even if you don’t think you have leaks.

I’m working on two fun little projects. One project is for JQuery and the other is for Merb. and planning on putting all of my plugins/code/garbage into subversion (or darcs) for checkout. Maybe both. I still love Darcs.

I read Zed Shaw’s post like everyone else in the Ruby community. I don’t subscribe to his blog, but about ten people I knew forwarded the article to me. Even people outside of the Ruby community forwarded to me. I haven’t read a lot of what people think about it, and maybe they don’t think anything. So, here’s what I think.

All of what I am about to say pertains to the Rails community. From what I’ve found over the last few years, the two communities are very different.

Mongrel was written about two years ago. Does that surprise you? Well, it should. It’s a long time to run dozens/hundreds of processes and manage each one individually. We need a better deployment mechanism that doesn’t require us to manage hundreds of little processes. We need one now. Rails lack of thread-safety in this case is killing people. That’s one of the main reason I, like many others, find JRuby so interesting.

How about documentation? I built a documentation site about a year and a half or so ago, and thanks to google it is well-trafficked. But, people don’t really contribute useful things. Caboose Rails thousands of dollars to build an app that, as far I know, is used but hasn’t really made documentation much better. People still ask me all the time about Rails methods, documentation, how to do something. It’s just not working.

People need to step up to the plate and solve the hard problems. How are we going to make Rails thread safe? How are we going to make deployment, and much more important, deployed application maintenance easier? When can I stop running monit, god, or whatever to keep my business running? How are we going to make documentation better? How can we contribute to Ruby, and not just to Rails?

Everyone has New Year’s resolutions, so here’s mine:

This year I’ve resolved to take baby steps, starting with The Calendar About Nothing. So far, I haven’t broken the chain. Let’s meet back here in December and see if my streak is at 365, shall we?

As a further step to that, I’ve resolved to be open. Very open. I’ve already started the process, putting several libraries on Github that I am working on. I am going to be pushing out anything that I am legally able to, to Github.

I also decided that I really miss music, so I bought the wife a guitar (Epiphone Les Paul Special), borrowed her old guitar and started learning. I can already read music from my orchestra days, so it was just learning the hard stuff. The goal is to practice every day, but most likely it’ll be 3-4 times a week.

Lastly, I’ve decided that this is the year to get out there and network, etc. Living the last four years in the Rails community has shown me that it’s not necessarily the best people who get the farthest, but usually the best networkers. I’m not necessarily looking to get the farthest, but it’s always nice to not fade away either. It’s sad that salesmanship is an important part of being excellent in my chosen profession, but there you have it.

Related to getting out and networking, I will be teaching a Ruby and Rails class at the CCAE in Cambridge MA. The class will be ultra-cheap (<$200), last 8-weeks, and hopefully while cramming a lot of material into a short amount of time, teach the students enough about Ruby and Rails to be successful. The class starts April 7th from 8-10pm. I don’t get paid based on how many students there are, just in case you’re wondering.

I’m also flirting with the idea of starting a polyglot programming group in the Boston area. Getting people with many different language interests and expertise together to share ideas, tips, and tricks. I’ll keep you updated on that.

This small list should keep me going for another year, at least!