I was introduced to the world of Ruby in general (and Ruby on Rails specifically) almost 2 years ago. Prior to that my professional programming experience consisted mostly of PHP, with a little bit of Java and ASP thrown in for good measure.

Then came that almost magical day when I was hired to a new job and instructed that I needed to learn Ruby on Rails.

"Ok, I can do that."

I absolutely fell in love with the language and the framework, and that experience put me on the path that led here to Pivotal Labs. But I know that I still have a lot to learn, so am still picking up things that in some ways I feel stupid for not having picked up earlier.

One such thing is RailsConf. I had heard of it before, but not in any kind of context that I really appreciated it or understood what that was (I'm getting a better idea now after some research).

Now I really want to get involved and submit a proposal for a talk/presentation at RailsConf. I just have no idea what to do it on or where to start....

Interesting

• A lot of us have been seeing significant slowdown and memory problems with RubyMine lately. One of the Pivots brought this up again today, and remarked that RubyMine performed much better after he removed/detached a bunch of gems and only added back in the ones he was concerned about ever having to go into again.
• Still in the vein of RubyMine, my Pair and I at one point set the memory allocation for RubyMine higher than the initial settings a weeks or so ago. I got to talking with a few of the Pivots about RubyMine and its memory settings and they said this is actually what you do NOT want to do. Apparently if RubyMine has too much memory available, then it doesn't garbage collect anywhere near as often as it probably should.

Helps

• In an Rspec test file, integrate_views is set up to be active by default. However, we want to run a particular describe block in the file in isolation mode. We tried using 'integrate_views( false )' right after the describe header, but that didn't seem to do anything like what was expected. Just calling 'integrate_views' when the default is Isolation mode runs a describe block in Integration mode, but is there a way to do the opposite?

Helps/Interesting

• It was brought up that Snow Leopard has finally, completely, disabled the ability to re-enable the "Awesome" extra functionality of the Screen Sharing app. Once you upgrade to Snow Leopard, you'll have to pay for Remote Desktop to get that awesomeness.

[Title]Standup 19 October, 2009

Pretty tame for my first day as the Standup Blogger for Pivotal Labs. I think the other Pivots were taking it easy on me today.

Helps

• Someone (sorry, still trying to learn names and match them to faces) asked if anyone had an information regarding Ruby Enterprise Edition. Good idea? Bad idea? It was brought up that, for a while at least, REE was broken for 64-bit. Is that still the case?
• The only other thing brought up was another Pivot asked if any of the Jasmine and Jelly experts would stick around after Stand Up to give him some advice.