All of my long-form thoughts on tech, leadership, product design, and more, collected in chronological order.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.