Glenn Vanderburg: Blog

Glenn Vanderburg's personal weblog.

MagLev - (Found July 2, 2008 )

Chad Fowler nails it with his summary of MagLev. Like Chad, I think MagLev&8217;s initial performance numbers will hold up. It&8217;s possible that as it matures it will get slower, but it could get a lot slower than it is now and still easily be the fastest Ruby VM around. And I agree with Chad that it might even get faster. I&8217;ve also spent some time investigating how to make Ruby run on a Smalltalk VM, and it&8217;s a really close fit. During the presentation at RailsConf, either Avi.
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Languages/Ruby/maglev.rdoc

Code generation, synthesis, whatever - (Found July 2, 2008 )

I&8217;m so glad Avi Bryant jumped into this discussion. (I was hoping he would.) The story so far (for the probably 99% of my readers who don&8217;t read a lot of Smalltalk blogs): Avi and I had a discussion last year at OSCON about Ruby and Smalltalk, and Rails and Seaside. Avi was once a Ruby guy, but switched to Smalltalk (but he&8217;s still friendly to the Ruby crowd). I&8217;m currently a Ruby and Rails guy, but I&8217;ve evangelized Seaside rather extensively. During our discussion,.
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Languages/code_noodling.rdoc

Growing Great Programmers - (Found July 2, 2008 )

Here&8217;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 programmers with a solid, confident grasp of design and development principles that I didn&8217;t learn until I was much older. I don&8217;t mean to embarrass either Jamis or Koz by this; I admire them greatly. They make me optimistic about the future of my...
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Development/growing_great_programmers.rdoc

Highlights from RailsConf 2007 - (Found July 2, 2008 )

Chad&8217;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 Heinemeier Hansson. From David&8217;s RailsConf keynote: "What we want to manipulate &8230; is people." (With a little careful editing, you can turn a harmless quote into just about anything!) Seeing Uncle Bob speak. He&8217;s a master, and I..
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/railsconf07_highlights.rdoc

"I don't think this is an act that a healthy company would commit." - (Found July 2, 2008 )

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. Tim Bray, as he so often does, nails it.
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Development/looking_sickly.rdoc

Try It - (Found July 2, 2008 )

Two of my best friends in the Ruby community have suddenly gone all nyah nyah on us, and it&8217;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) says it&8217;s more like training wheels. Being intentionally provocative to knock people out of old assumptions is all well and good &8230; but even though I love Ruby, and am so glad to be working in it now after 11 years of Java, my perspective is.
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Development/try_it.rdoc

Keeping Track of Unimplemented Features - (Found July 2, 2008 )

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 implement and turned it into a Rails app. It was still static HTML -- there was no code at all in the application, and no database yet -- but the page was being rendered by the new Rails application. I carved the page up into a layout, main template, and appropriate.
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Development/Tools/unimpl_class.blog

Textmate Footnotes - (Found July 2, 2008 )

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 it, but apparently it's not as widely known as it should be. I first learned about footnotes from Geoff Grosenbach, when he interviewed me last year for the Ruby on Rails Podcast. Geoff mentioned that it links lines from a Rails stack trace (displayed in the...
http://www.vanderburg.org/Blog/Software/Development/Tools/textmate_footnotes.blog