20 Clojure Links To Get You Up To Speed

Writing multi-threaded code is hard. If you’ve ever done concurrent programming, you’ll probably agree. Clojure offers a compelling alternative to traditional object-oriented approaches to programming and has garnered much attention from the Ruby community because of it’s elegant design that lets you get right to the essence of a problem.

Git blogging with Aerial

Over the last few years, I have grown tired of maintaining, migrating, and upgrading blog software, so I’ve decided to roll my own with Ruby code. In doing so, I wanted to keep things as simple as possible with a basic set of features: articles, pages, comments, rss, etc. What I didn’t want is a SQL database or an administration tool. I wanted to write articles in my text editor of choice (Emacs), in Markdown format, and versioned with Git.

RubyConf 2008 Wrap Up

This month I headed down to Orlando, Florida for RubyConf 2008. It kicked off with a delightful (and touching) keynote by Matz. He walked through his own programming history with languages including the language he got started with BASIC (the same language I started with). Matz talked about the growing community and a statistic from Gartner that says there are over a million Ruby developers and will grow to 4 million by 2012, which is amazing.

Two+ Years Working with Rails

Update: I thought I should give a little background on how I got started with Rails - when I was attending the SDWest conference in March 2006. I was at the Jolt Awards, and saw @d2h receive the award for the best web development tool for Rails 1.0. I downloaded Rails that night in the hotel room and was hooked.

Quick git add, commit, push, and deploy

Last week, I was preparing a presentation and found myself doing a lot of quick fixes and deployments to prepare a web application for a demonstration. I thought instead of running the following four commands each time:

Relay outbound SMTP email to Gmail

Sending emails with Rails via Gmail is a snap with Marc Chung’s excellent plugin action_mailer_tls. However sometimes our production environment isn’t using Gmail as a mail server and/or we just need an easy way to send email from our development environment for testing or demonstrating purposes.