Jake Scruggs

(or the second day if you count the tutorials) To start things off Jim Freeze got up and announced that there are 282 attendees and seats for 280 -- So make friends. The the first talk of the day was "The Next Ruby" by Bruce Williams and he (of course) discussed the difference between Ruby 1.8.6 and 1.9 Bruce recommended a good test suite if you're planning to move to 1.9 and I have to agree. Tests are good for lots of reasons (including design) but they pay for themselves 100 times over when you need to do a big tech migration. Because of changes to string, anything string heavy (such as parsers) is gonna need some love. On the plus side: "ruby"[0] => 114 in Ruby 1.8.6 "ruby"[0] => "r" in Ruby 1.9 Yep, I've been burned by that and I'm glad to see sanity carry the day. In other news: Hash.select now returns a hash Hashes will maintain order :this === "this" #true Because of Multinationalization Strings now have each...

The other day I was showing Rails off to a friend of mine who wanted to know what all the fuss was about and I realized a shocking thing: I was horrible at starting a Rails site. Why? Because for the last year or so I've been working on large, established Rails codebases. Which is kinda cool as it shows how far Rails has come, but it sucks because one of the very cool things about Rails is how much you can do in a short amount of time. So I resolved to create and deploy a small site as a way to exercise some atrophied muscles and have some good old fun with Ruby and Rails. My father, Leslie Scruggs, is a sculptor and I had written him a pure html site back in 1999. And he maintained it editing the raw html files, creating his own thumbnails, and uploading via ftp. Not the easiest of tasks for a man in his 60's. So I created lesliescruggs.com which has an admin section so he can upload pics and get them resized and thumbnailed with 10% of the effort. Of course I us...

Finished the first day of Rails Conf and here are my impressions: DHH's keynote: Lets celebrate what we have. Blah blah blah. Rails has come a long way. Yadda yadda yadda. Here's a sneak preview of what ActiveResource is going to be like in Rails 2.0. Ooooh, Aaaah. Actually the ActiveResource stuff was pretty cool. With a little bit of setup you can have one controller method serve up xml and text and html and all sorts of stuff. All RESTful style of course. And the debugger will be back (broken when someone fixed a bug in Ruby 1.85) and it will be a real debugger. When will 2.0 be out? He didn't say. Go use edge if you dare. Bob Martin's Clean Code Presentation: On the one hand, this is a lot of stuff I've heard before (I hung around Object Mentor at the start of my career), but Uncle Bob is such a good speaker he got me all fired up again about TDD, Red Green Refactor, and incremental steps. There was this point where a slide was clearly missing from th...

This content has moved to  https://jakescruggs.com/blog/2007/01/17/btw-heres-where-im-staying-while-on

This content has moved to https://jakescruggs.com/blog/2007/01/16/end-to-end-example