Tag: English Interviews - 1/2

Configuration Management is a tricky subject. For non-starters, when you’re a developer and you have few boxes to take care of, you can usually get away with just managing them manually. People are probably just used to pop in a CD, double-click the “install” program and click “next”, “next” until the end, then you manually log in to backup (when you remember it), and sometimes you do apply some security updates when you remember about them.

But then you have more than a dozen machines, things start to get uglier, you end up making more mistakes, forgetting important steps, and all of a sudden managing machines become a nightmare. You end up being woken up in the middle of the night because you forgot to install some crucial component, and so on and so forth.

The same way you need testing, continuous integration tools when you’re a developer, you also need automated, reliable and flexible tools for the system administrator role. That’s where tools such as Chef kick in to help.

From Opscode Inc., we have Adam Jacob (CTO) and Jesse Robbins (CEO) to talk about the new contender in the automated system administration field, Chef, already in use by many companies which are striving with the cutting edge to maintain their datacenters.

Configuration Management is a tricky subject. For non-starters, when you’re a developer and you have few boxes to take care of, you can usually get away with just managing them manually. People are probably just used to pop in a CD, double-click the “install” program and click “next”, “next” until the end, then you manually log in to backup (when you remember it), and sometimes you do apply some security updates when you remember about them.

But then you have more than a dozen machines, things start to get uglier, you end up making more mistakes, forgetting important steps, and all of a sudden managing machines become a nightmare. You end up being woken up in the middle of the night because you forgot to install some crucial component, and so on and so forth.

The same way you need testing, continuous integration tools when you’re a developer, you also need automated, reliable and flexible tools for the system administrator role. That’s where tools such as Puppet kick in to help.

This time I’ve interviewed Luke Kanies, from Reductive Labs, former contributor to the famous CFEngine tool and creator of Puppet, one of the most acclaimed configuration management tool for 21st century datacenters.

This time I had some time with Joshua Peek. He was recently announced as a new member of the Rails Core Team.

He got the honor because of his hard work for the upcoming Rails 2.2, solving the thread-safety issue within Rails. Because of his Google Summer of Code project, guided by Michael Koziarski, they were able to make Ruby on Rails truly Thread-Safe, which could be a great boost for virtual machines with native-threading support, such as JRuby.

The interesting bit: he is just 19 years old and 4 years ago he wasn’t a programmer. He started on Ruby with Learn to Program and he is now a Rails Core member. Let’s get to know him.

This time I interviewed Luis Lavena. If you’re a Ruby developer working on Windows, you owe him a lot! After all he is the maintainer of One-Click Ruby Installer, the main Windows Ruby distribution. It is a lot of work to maintain such a distro and Luis explains all the hoops necessary to achieve this. The main message: we need more collaborators! Anyone can rant, but there are a few that actually step down from the pedestal and get their hands dirty.

Ruby on Rails is big. Twitter is big. And because of that they became easy targets for the media and the frustrated pundits wanting a few more pageviews. “Blaine Cook” was one of Twitter’s developers and he kindly agreed to participate on one of my interviews. And, of course, he will answer the question “Does Rails Scale?”

Hongli Lai and Ninh Bui, from Phusion, shaked the Rails world a few days ago. They unleashed the Holy Grail of Rails deployment: mod_rails which was received with much fanfare, and they deserved it.

They finally settled the big issue that embarrassed Railers in the past. This will also relieve dozens of hosting services that were clueless on how to solve this equation. Now, those two computer science students are above them all with this clever solution. And they have more to come.

I was very fortunate to be able to interview them. I think this is the second interview, InfoQ broke the news first with this other interview which I highly recommend to understand more of the inner gears of Passenger. They are very easy going and it was a pleasure to talk to them.

Chris is a very accessible and easy-going guy, and I just got him out of AIM and started the interview right away. For those of you who never heard of ‘Chris Wanstrath’, he is also known for Err the Blog and recently as one of the guys behind the Github phenomenon.

He answered everything in color detail and we speak a lot about his open source projects, performance, scalability and, of course, lots of Git and Github stuff. Hopefully it will make people even more excited with how the Ruby/Rails community is moving things forward all the time.

aos leitores brasileiros: assim que tiver tempo irei traduzir esta entrevista.

This week I interviewed another person from the Microsoft camp, Scott Hanselman. I know him from his podcast Hanselminutes. In one episode he interviewed both Martin Fowler and David Hansson at last year’s RailsConf, a truly remarkable conversation.

He also posted a great screencast about Microsoft’s new alternative MVC framework and I thought it would be great to have him at my blog to talk about technology and web frameworks. As I said before I think that we should not become alienated about what’s going on in other fronts and Scott is a very forward thinking and open minded person as well.

It was Avi Bryant that evangelized the neat idea of “turtles all the way”, meaning that for a language to be called ‘complete’ it should be able to extend itself. So, the ideal world would have Ruby being extended in Ruby, not in C. JRuby goes as far as it can building up a sandbox for Ruby code to run under the JVM. As cool as it is, we still rely on Java to fully extend it.

Enter Rubinius and its author Evan Phoenix, currently a full-time employee for EngineYard. Rubinius borrows heavily from Smalltalk’s concepts of a virtual machine and does as little as possible in C just for the bootstrap and all the rest is developed over pure Ruby.

Rubinius answers lots of questions about going forward over the current Ruby MRI but also raises several other questions that I hope we can nail down today in this interview with Evan himself.

So let’s get started.

The Ruby Way is the undisputed must-have book in any Rubyist bookshelf. Rather than being a ‘reference’ book it explains what it takes to really dive into the intricacies and marvels of the Ruby programming style.

Today I am very happy being able to engage in a conversation with one of my favorite authors, Hal Fulton. This was a great chat and I know people will be delighted as well. He is one of the Ruby veterans and certainly has a lot of experience to share. So, let’s start:

AkitaOnRails: First of all, it is a tradition at my blog to ask for the guest’s background. How long you’ve been at the programming career? How did you first get there? What inspires you about the computer world?

Hal Fulton: I started college as a physics major, but I found that I was taking computer courses for fun. I switched to computer science and the rest was history.

Unlike most younger people now, I never was really exposed to computers until I was sixteen, because personal computers were much less common then. I was hooked right away. I saw the computer as a “magic box” that could do anything I was smart enough to instruct it to do. Really I still feel that way about it.

Ruby Inside is one of the greatest Ruby/Rails website available and a great source of news. Its creator is the British entrepreneur Peter Cooper, also the author of the recently published book Beginning Ruby, from Novice to Professional, an excellent source for anyone willing to learn the Ruby language.

Peter speaks about Ruby on Rails, business, novices and, as a last-minute exclusive, he comments on the recent Nuclear Zed episode that shocked a lot of people in the community. Just to clarify, Peter answered my questions before New Years Eve, it’s only the last question that was added today.

Once again, I deeply apologize the brazilian audience because I didn’t have time to translate this into Portuguese today, but I will do very soon. Stay tuned.

Traducción en Español

As I promised after the Avi Bryant interview, here’s a great conversation with Adrian Holovaty, well known creator of the Django web framework written in Python.

For me this is an important piece because I always say that technology doesn’t have to be about divorce. Technology is about integration. I am a full-time Ruby on Rails developer and evangelist, but above all, I try to be a ‘good’ programmer. And good programmers acknowledge good technology and their creators achievements. And Adrian’s Django is such a remarkable achievement that deserves the attention and success.

So, as my very first post of the year (published at 0:01hs!), I would like to celebrate the great minds of our ‘development’ community, wishing that the good developers use their time creating great technology instead of wasting it in useless flame wars.

If you didn’t read it, take a look at Part 1 where we get to know more about Avi Bryant and his amazing product Dabble DB. In Part 2 Avi goes a little bit more in elaborating his technology opinions and points of view. It’s a very insightful reading for every programmer.

As I always say – and Avi is competent pointing out -, Ruby has its drawbacks – most of them being improved on Ruby 1.9, JRuby and Rubinius. Avi gives us good reasons why Smalltalk is yet another great platform to learn, bringing back decades of evolution and maturity. So, here goes, the unabridged version of the interview.

And stay tuned! I hope to have Evan Phoenix, Hal Fulton, Peter Cooper and Adrian Holovaty as my next guests. Lot’s of material to begin 2008 in great style.

Someone once challenged all other frameworks implying that no one would get close to what we are doing in Rails … except for Avi.Seaside is such a departure from the status quo that Avi himself describes it of a ‘heretic’ framework. And he is right. He looked back in history and took what is considered ‘the’ father – and arguably ‘the’ best implementaton – of object-oriented languages: Smalltalk.

Taking clues from the venerable Apple WebObjects he set his way to implement Seaside and his very successful web product, Dabble DB. Check it out who is the man, what are his opinions and why he is so relevant to the Ruby and Rails community even though he advocates another language and another framework. Sounds strange, but when Avi speaks, you listen.

He was very kind to provide me a very long interview. It is so long I divided it in 2 parts. This is the first Part. I will release the second one in a few days. Hope you all enjoy it.

It’s been a while since my last international interview, and I am back with no other than one of the responsibles for Ruby being enabled in the .NET platform. That’s correct, I’ve covering a lot about JRuby and Rubinius but we can’t neglect that one of the biggest platforms out there in the market is receiving the Ruby treatment as well. So I invited John Lam , who kindly answered several questions regarding this endeavor.

Remembering that IronRuby – named after IronPython, the first of the main open source dynamic languages built on top of .NET – is a true open source project, and also has a 3rd party addon for Visual Studio.NET, so programmers used to the VS.NET workflow can get onboard with a lower learning curve ahead of them.

Despite of opinions against Microsoft just for the sake of arguing, the fact remains that Java and .NET represent the biggest corporate development market today. And this is also a fact that the Ruby meme is spreading in a very fast way. Being built to run on top of both the JVM and the CLR represents Ruby being enabled for market niches that it wouldn’t reach otherwise, and this is huge win. I talked a little bit about this in my article (in portuguese): For myself to win, the other one has to lose. There are very intelligent people at Microsoft, John Lam being one of them.

This is another big interview. This time with Jamis Buck, the programmer that helped David Hansson himself right at the beggining of Rails, at 37signals. Today most renowned for his achievements in Capistrano and a lot of other Ruby libraries as sqlite-ruby bindings and Net::SSH. Jamis was very kind to give us the opportunity to know more about his career and the beginnings of the Ruby on Rails story. AkitaOnRails: Ok, so let’s get started. first thing I always ask my guests: what’s your back...

This will be a fun interview. My guest this time is my boss. He not only is an employee of Surgeworks but an active Ruby contributor and participates mainly in the Utah Rails User Groups (URUG). Many of his values and ideas resemble my own. Carl Youngblood has worked professionally as a software engineer for over ten years, and is currently the Rails Practice Manager for Surgeworks, a software engineering consulting firm (where I happen to be as well :-). In addition to his work at Surgeworks...

Its been a few days already, since the historical release of JRuby 1.0, the first stable implementation of an alternative Ruby interpreter. And what other platform than Java to hold the power of Ruby? Meet Ola Bini, a young, dynamic and important contributor to this amazing project. Ola is member of the JRuby Core Team and currently work at ThoughtWorks to help assure the continuing success of JRuby. I had the opportunity to chat for more than an hour with him. So, another great interview for...

Chatting with David Black As I reported on my last post, on April 24th I was very fortunate to interview two great celebrities from the Ruby world: Chad Fowler and David Black. I love to chat with experienced people because I learn so much. David Black was a great guest, we had a very nice conversation where I pushed a little bit more of the subject that I like to discuss: programmers careers. David is one of the founders of Ruby Central and he as his own company called Ruby Power and Light w...

Chatting with Chad Fowler Last Tuesday (April, 24th) was a memorable day for me. I was able to have not only one, but two celebrities from the Ruby community. I interviewed Chad Fowler in the morning and then David Black in the evening. The original founders of the Ruby Central and two of the main responsibles for evangelizing Ruby back in 2001. Both are veterans of our community and they were very kind. As you well know, I am a brazilian Rails advocate and our local community is still small,...

Chatting with Geoffrey Grosenbach The Dr Nic interview was a huge success and getting to know and exchange ideas with people as smart and intelligent is very addicting. So, I was again very fortunate to get in touch with Geoffrey Grosenbach, from Topfunky Corporation. He was very kind accepting my invitation for this interview and sharing some of his experiences with us, Brazilians. I am trying hard to get to know and interview more celebrities from our industry, so hang on there, because we...