An in interview with O’Reilly, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson had an excellent response to the obligatory twitter question. To paraphrase, he says that the kind of person that users the A is B, B is C, therefore A is C logic that “Twitter runs on Rails, Twitter Can’t Scale, so Rails can’t scale” simply illustrates their shallow level of technical knowledge.
Amazon invests in Engine Yard to take Rails further into the cloud
Nathan / July 15, 2008, 9:35 am
Engine Yard has just closed a second round of funding for $15m, including contributions from Amazon, with the focus on increasing their hosting platform and community-driven open source projects. According to Ezra, “We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.” Some of the exciting developments coming out of Engine Yard these days are the merb framework, which is a leaner/quicker Ruby framework insipired by Rails and Rubinius, a pure Ruby implementation of the Ruby virtual machine which aims to solve some of the current performance issues with Ruby. Perhaps most interesting is the yet to be unveiled Vertebra project that has been described as “a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP”. Rails developers can sleep a bit easier knowing that EY has 80 employees and some of the smartest minds in the community cranking away on the remaining pain points in the Ruby platform (hosting, performance)
Further evidence that Apple is the new Microsoft.
Caleb / April 4, 2008, 8:50 am
Recently it has been in the press that Apple has said they will not put the Flashplayer onto the iPod touch or the iPhone because they say the lite version isn’t good enough for the iPhone. Adobe then said they were going to make a player anyways using the newly released SDK, but quickly realized they couldn’t due to the extreme limitations of the SDK (more here).
At any rate, as the flash guy around here, I was not particularly surprised or thrilled at this news. On further reflection though, I realized the truth – what I am now calling the “Apple Flash Conspiracy.” There have been rumors of Netflix using the newest version of the Flashplayer (which supposedly has DRM capability built in) to start streaming their movies on Apple computers. Apple, now in the movie renting business, stands to lose potential business by allowing this to happen. If I can already watch movies using a subscription I’m already paying for, why rent from iTunes? If they can prevent it from happening on the iPod and iPhone, the better for them.
I realize this is most likely not what is happening, but it’s still something to think about.
follow the pass
Caleb / March 27, 2008, 10:37 am
A great PSA out of the UK about paying attention to cyclists. It’s an interesting lesson about focus and how it changes your view of the overall picture.
the source dothetest
communication breakdown.
Caleb / February 21, 2008, 3:28 pm
this is what happens when clients and vendors have a communication breakdown
Customer: ‘Yes, I would like to order a cake for a going away party this week.’
Employee: ‘Whatchu want on da cake?’
Customer: ‘Best Wishes Suzanne.’ And underneath that ‘We will miss you’.
What makes Ruby so great?
Nathan / December 19, 2007, 2:37 pm
Things you take for granted after using Ruby for awhile:
#This works: topic.posts.length > 0 #The Ruby way: topic.posts.any? #This works: topic.posts[topic.posts.length-1] #The Ruby way: topic.posts.last #This works: if!((foo != nil)&&(foo != '')) #The Ruby way: unless foo.blank?
Other nice things that I don’t care to come up with the harder version by hand for:
5.days.from_now 5.days.ago
note: day.* and .blank? only works in rails, not ruby out the box
Google Zeitgeist 2007
Iain / December 13, 2007, 5:58 pm
The yearly Google Zeitgeist is always a great read (in a dorky sort of way).
David Byrne On The NY Times
Iain / December 11, 2007, 6:22 pm
Posts like this are one of the reasons David Byrne is one of my favorite bloggers.