Season of Ruby – Iteration 4 Retrospective

Iteration 4? Wait, shouldn’t I be on Iteration 5?  Yes, but as expected work reared its ugly head and the Season of Ruby got pushed to the back of the line. I am now through Chapter 8 of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial.  I wish I had tracked the actual time spent on the tutorial, [...]

Read Full Post »

New Startup Accelerator Program Coming To Boston

There is a new startup accelerator looking to set up shop in Boston this summer.  The thing that caught my eye is that this accelerator, Bolt, will focus on connected devices.  Real…physical…stuff. I think that this is great for the Boston area.  We already have a lot of energy and effort in the area around [...]

Read Full Post »

Season of Ruby – Iteration 3 Retrospective

I am now a month into the  Season of Ruby, so aside from the usual retrospective, it is a good time to reflect on what I have learned to this point.  In the last month I have made the following strides: Set up a github account and pushed code up to it. Re-familiarized myself with [...]

Read Full Post »

Halftime Review of Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial

I am a newcomer to Ruby and Ruby on Rails, so when I wanted to get started with Rails I looked around quite a bit for a good starting point.  I finally settled on Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial.  I am about halfway through with the tutorial, and I am really pleased so far.  This [...]

Read Full Post »

Season of Ruby – A Bad Day Of Fishing

I have been really excited to get going with Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial.  Skimming through the table of contents and the introduction, I liked that he makes testing such a focal point of the tutorial.  I also liked the Comments for Various Readers section.  I fit into the “Experienced programmers new to web development” camp, and [...]

Read Full Post »

Season of Ruby – Iteration 2 Retrospective

Things are coming together well with the Season of Ruby.  Getting out of my comfort zone was a driving theme and there has been some discomfort, but I am now establishing a new comfort zone, familiarizing myself with a new language and new tools.  There is still a lot of work to do, but I [...]

Read Full Post »

Season of Ruby – You’ll Always Remember Your First Fork

Forking the cocaine project gave me a chance to see a little bit more of Ruby style, at least with an ‘n of 1’.  The goal wasn’t to make any sweeping changes, just get it to run, see some of the style and implementation choices, and break through another barrier, i.e. forking a project on github. [...]

Read Full Post »

On Fundamentals, Frameworks, and Fiefdoms

I was equal parts encouraged and discouraged at this recent post by Uncle Bob.  As a software development community, we rally around the flags of .NET, Ruby, ASP.NET MVC, Python, Rails, Clojure or whatever platform, language, framework you want to throw out there.  I was encouraged that there are people, like Uncle Bob, who feel that [...]

Read Full Post »