Blog
Posted
Chad Fowler nails it
with his summary of MagLev.
Like Chad, I think MagLev’s initial performance numbers will hold up.
It’s possible that as it matures it will get slower, but it could get
a lot slower than it is now and st
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Posted
Here’s another highlight from RubyConf 2007: watching Jamis Buck and
Michael Koziarski give a terrific keynote based on their joint blog, The Rails Way. I leaned over to Alan
Francis and mentioned how encouraging it is to see young programm
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Posted
Chad’s opening call to change the way our community is perceived from
the outside. Preach on, brother!
Hot on the heels of that, Chad
strumming on his ukelele while Rich Kilmer gamely tried to deadpan
through his introduction of David He
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Posted
Douglas Crockford says, "I
don't think this is an act that a healthy company would commit.". He
was referring to Media Rights Technologies, but he could just as easily
have been referring to Microsoft
more »
Posted
Two of my best friends in the Ruby community have suddenly gone all
nyah nyah on us, and it’s time for a bit of reality. Neal
Ford says static typing is communist
bureaucracy,
and Stuart Halloway (presumably trying to tone things down a bit) say
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Posted
I started a new Rails project last week. The customer had done an
unusually good job of working out the site look-and-feel ahead of
time, so my first day on the project I grabbed the HTML mockup of the
first page we were going to implem
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Posted
For a while now I've been using Duane Johnson's TextMate Footnotes plugin with my
Rails development. It's been the biggest boost to my productivity
since I started using Rails. I kind of assumed that most Rails
developers were using i
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Posted
Greg Vaughn thinks there are only
two people who read his blog. I’m pretty darn sure at least six read
mine, so maybe I can quadruple Greg’s readership today.
I’m always interested in the things that other fields can teach us
abou
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Presentations
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Building on part 1, this talk dives deep into JavaScript's object model. We'll see how it differs from more mainstream object-oriented languages, and why. We'll explore how to hide some of those differences, as well as the reasons you might not want to.
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Dynamic programming languages are on the rise. There are several possible explanations, but the biggest one is probably their support for metaprogramming: the ability to extend the language itself with domain-specific capabilities that keep your system s
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Performance myths about the Java platform abound, from the general "Java is slow", to the more specific "reflection is slow", "allocation is slow", "synchronization is slow", "garbage collection is slow", etc. Many of these myths have their root in fact (
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Ajax applications have unique design and architectural challenges and opportunities. This presentation will show you how to take advantage of the Ajax's strengths, and work around its quirks.
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Most of the time we don't have to think about how the network works; it's hidden from us by higher-level abstractions. Sometimes though, it helps to understand what's happening on the wire. This talk will provide an overview of some of the core protocol
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Many people love Ruby at first sight, and some never learn to like it at all. But the most common reaction is a middle ground: at first glance it seems like nothing special, but after using it for a while, subtle strengths start to become apparent and th
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The early years of computers -- the '50s and '60s -- were characterized by furious exploration of a huge variety of different ideas. Since then many of the hot topics of those days have moved to the fringe, largely ignored by the mainstream of software d
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Functional programming languages have been around for years, but have mostly been used by academics. Several factors are causing them to be taken more seriously by average software developers, and there's a strong chance that functional programming will
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