My Talk at RubyNation 2010

I will be speaking at RubyNation 2010. My topic is “Leveraging Rails to Build FaceBook Applications.” This is a distillation of some of the practical tactics that my development team at MetroStar Systems has used to create highly successful FaceBook applications using Rails, including real-life systems like PollCast and Iran Voices. FaceBook is the world’s largest social network, with over 600 million members.

RubyNation 2010 Speakers Selected

The conference organizers, including myself, met last night to finish the evaluation of the 60+ talk proposals we received this year for RubyNation. After a lot of discussion, we’ve now narrowed them down to the final set, pending some last minute tweaking and final confirmations of a few details with a couple of the speakers. Notifications of acceptance/non-acceptance will be going out soon.

Ruby is 10th Most Popular Programming Language

Tiobe Software does a monthly index of the top programming languages. Ruby is listed as the 10th most popular language. Java, as you might expect, is ranked first (although its market share has been steadily declining over time). It’s an interesting overview. Check it out.

Note: (2018/01/13) It’s years later, and Ruby is currently in 11th place.

Cory Doctorow on Internet Productivity

Cory Doctorow, writer and Internet commentator, compares the Internet to rock-n-roll, citing the fluid, chaotic nature of Internet businesses. He holds that the primary advantage offered by the Internet is “doing something X-percent as well with less-than-X-percent” of the necessary resources.

Yes, My Yahoo Account Got Attacked

My Yahoo account got hacked. Joy. I’ve used Yahoo for about 10 years now to manage my various email accounts, and was not pleased at this development. Yes, I’m also aware that all my contacts got spammed.

Git is Great for Branches

I’ve been using git pretty heavily lately. The commands are a little wonky to learn, but once you’ve mastered a core set, distributed software revision control becomes a snap. I’m particularly impressed with how smoothly git manages branches and synchronization. I remember how painful that was in Subversion (and CVS).