Edward Hieatt's blog
The first Golden Gate Ruby Conference (GoGaRuCo) starts tomorrow in San Francisco. Pivotal Labs is happy to be a sponsor of the event. Pivot David Stevenson will be giving a talk titled "Playing With Fire: Running Uploaded Ruby Code in a Sandbox". We have a booth where you can come by and chat with us; we'll be showing off Pivotal Tracker.
Also, Pivotal Labs will be hosting the live Justin.tv feed of the entire conference at pivotallabs.com/gogaruco. Pivot Chad Woolley will be live-blogging every talk at pivotallabs.com/gogaruco/blog and, when the conference is over, we'll make available videos of all the talks from the conference at pivotallabs.com/gogaruco/talks.
If you're coming to the conference, we're looking forward to seeing you there; otherwise, we hope you'll follow along from home, starting at pivotallabs.com/gogaruco!
How my outlook on coding in Rails has changed over the past few months!
When I made the switch from Java to Rails a few years back, I, like many of my fellow Pivots making that same well-chronicled transition, delighted in the ease with which we could suddenly knock out a web app. How we cheered when our object-relational mapping took zero lines of code! How we applauded when we declared our model object validations in near-English! How we roared with laughter when convention viciously slapped the face of configuration! And how we shook our heads in dismay when we realized that our new development environment appeared to be from the mid-, if not early, nineties.
For, while we had arrived in a brave new world of minimalist declarative meta-programming, rapid prototyping, and an new-found sense of productivity that made even the most nimble forms of Java development look like wading through a morass of slimy boilerplate code and endless XML, we soon realized that the IDE situation was less than awesome. Our productivity was overall much improved, but we had taken a huge step backwards when it came to the act of writing - and especially changing - code and tests. Overnight, we went from living it up in a paradise of automated refactorings, seamlessly inbuilt test runners and powerful debuggers to roughing it with a text editor that, to our spoilt eyes, appeared to offer barely more than code highlighting and support for homemade macros.