Satish Talim, from RubyLearning fame forwarded me 2 question from one of his students.

So I went to to write a few advices for him. Without knowing his level of expertise I tried to encompass tips for young programmers in general.

I hope it makes sense. Feel free to comment and ask questions.

Confreaks just released a new batch of awesome videotaped keynotes from the Goruco 2008 conference held in New York City. If you were not able to attend, that’s our second chance to take a look on what the community is doing.

I am particularly interested in Bryan Helmkamp’s keynote on Story Driven Development with RSpec, as I am myself trying to learn the user stories feature. I can bet Chris Wanstrath’s keynote on ParseTree is a lot of fun as well.

And if you also missed MountainWest RubyConf 2008 as well, don’t miss the videos there!

It is only RailsConf remaining to be taped! It is a waste of resources not to do it like that as we all around the world would immensely benefit.

I was just told by the Phusion guys that mod_rails 1.0.2 is going to be released today! Keep an eye on it. And if you didn’t do so, donate for the Ruby Enterprise Edition program (I am in the second batch already!)

Update 04/30: As I have said, Phusion released 1.0.2 with lots of features explained in their new corporate blog. New features include support for OS X’s built-in Apache, support for Rails below 2.0, more stability, a new tool to measure real memory usage (‘ps’ doesn’t convey the true memory), improved documentation, improved SSL support, and more.

Monday, Apr 1st, I was invited to participate in a series of interviews being published at FiveRun’s blog, called TakeFive. It was just published.

Thanks a lot for FiveRuns for choosing me, I am flattered as I don’t yet consider myself in the same luminary league as Chad Fowler, Peter Cooper, Pat Eyler, Satish Talim and all the others in the series. I hope to get up there, though :-)

This series revolves around 5 questions out of 15 that I could choose. Being prolific – as you well know – I actually answered all 15 of them. So I will publish here the remaining 10 that didn’t make into the interview. Hope you like’em.

Read the Rest

Last week I presented ActiveResource’s capabilities to some friends.

In summary, it’s a great library, but not perfect just yet, and should improve in the next versions. On the other hand, the majority of ‘REST’ APIs available – as they say – are not actually RESTful. Flickr and YouTube come to mind. Check out this link to learn on how to talk to Twitter. This other link to learn how to extend ActiveResource for non-REST APIs and this link to understand how to consume YouTube feeds.

But besides that I found out a small surprise: ActiveResource is documented in a way to imply that it has working client-side validations, but it’s not fully implemented! So I decided to investigate what would it take to have it working.

Read the Rest

If anyone is trying to install the ImageScience gem (sudo gem install image_science) for your Rails projects, and used MacPorts, you might be having strange problems. The usual command:

sudo port install freeimage

Will fail miserably. That’s because the newest FreeImage port, version 3.10.0, is broken. If you check it out at /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/freeimage/FreeImage3100.zip, the checksums are invalid as the port command states. I tried to download directly from sourceforge.net. But this zip is corrupted. Can’t unzip it manually. Dunno why.

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For the last 3 years a lot of people have been asking “Why should one use Ruby on Rails when my framework X is clearly superior?” or something like this.

That’s a good question, raises a lot of good points but the way those discussions end are a real shame for the whole community to say the very least. I can’t praise myself too much either because I was part of some flame wars as well and I don’t like what I said in some occasions as well. Yes, I acted like a troll myself and for that I apologize.

Read the Rest

Page down for brazilian portuguese article

Disclaimer: This video is hosted at Veoh and can be re-linked to any website without modifying either the video or audio. I am uploading it to Google Video and Vimeo (recommended).

Update 12/12: For those of you that think I was too fast in the video, I just posted a Tutorial with most of the content you can see in the screencast plus a few bonuses. I’ve split it into Part 1 and Part 2. Enjoy!

The First Screencast

Rails 2.0 was released officially last friday and it was a coincidence because I would present a keynote about it at our local “Rio on Rails”: http://www.rioonrails.com.br event here in Brazil. In this keynote I first presented the Rails 2.0 screencast. Tonight I decided to replay it a second time and mix an english narration over it.

I didn’t do deep research but I think this is the very first Rails 2.0 screencast released – correct me if I am wrong. The inspiration was, of course, the Creating a Weblog in 15 minutes the original screencast by David Hansson that caused so much discussion and polemic and that ultimately made Rails recognized throughout the internet.

The irony is that David made the real time blog programming during his keynote at FISL (Forum Internacional de Software Livre), back in 2005 here in Brazil. At that time almost no one knew what Rails was all about and very few people attended it. Now, almost 3 years later I’d like to go full cycle over it and make the very first Rails 2.0 screencast available from Brazil again. I hope this time our local development community pay more attention.

This time Rails doesn’t have to prove itself: it’s already got past this part. 2.0 is not about revolution, it’s about a stable and steady evolution. It’s about refinement and polish, making for an even greater user experience. I am enjoying it very much.

Without further ado, here it goes:


The First Rails 2.0 Screencast from akitaonrails on Vimeo.

Read the Rest