Today we opened the RailsConf Call For Proposals. So we soon begin the several-month process of putting together the program for RailsConf 2010 (in Baltimore!).
I’m particularly excited to start the process this year, because we’ve made a very positive change to the team. We’re bringing on Ben Scofield as program co-chair this year....
David Chelimsky and I were chatting a couple of weeks ago about my recently acquired running hobby and he asked “Why don’t you organize a 5k race at RubyConf?”
Then I said something like “heh”. Then we both thought about it some more and thought it might actually be a fun thing to do.
In a...
Since finishing The Passionate Programmer I’ve been putting a lot of thought into how to package the advice from the book into something more structured, serial, and prescriptive.
The Amazon reviews for the book are almost all glowingly positive with the occasional piece of constructive criticism. Here’s one such excerpt from an otherwise positive review...
There’s an old joke I heard in India which goes something like this:
What do you call a person who speaks many languages? Multilingual
What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual
What do you call a person who speaks one language? American
Sad, but usually true. I got fairly deep into my adult life without...
Yesterday I asked on Twitter whether anyone was successfully using is_paranoid in a Rails application, because I had confused myself into thinking it couldn’t possibly work.
The problem I was having wasn’t is_paranoid’s fault, but it turns out it actually can’t do what I wanted it to do in its native state. The explanation...
I just finished reading the inspiring The E-Myth Revisited, which like my own first book My Job Went to India suffers from an incredibly bad name.
This is definitely one of the most practically useful and potentially career-changing business books I’ve read. As I started getting toward the end, I realized that I should...
As a young self-taught software developer, one of the first books I remember reading was Steve McConnell’s Software Project Survival Guide: How to Be Sure Your First Important Project Isn’t Your Last. Who knows why I picked that one of all the possible books but I somehow knew I wanted to learn something about...
I had a great time at Ruby Nation this weekend. After my presentation I got a number of questions asking about things I referenced during the talk. Here’s an attempt to point to some of them. If you weren’t there, you won’t have any context but feel free to follow the links anyway You...
I’m reading Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel by Rolf Potts. I’m only a quarter of the way through it and it’s already worth the price. In the third chapter, Rolf talks about the American reaction to the Exxon Valdez oil spill in the late 80s. The nation...
While I was working on The Passionate Programmer I had the following Kurt Vonnegut quote (from A Man Without A Country) at the top of the introduction. Right before we published it, my editor reminded me that we had to get permission to print it. I was unable to reach anyone from Kurt...
Next month, I’ll be presenting at Ruby Nation in my home away from home, Northern Virginia (I seem to spend almost as much time there as I do in Colorado). The presentation will be something like this:
What should the career path of a programmer be? How do you know what you’re...
