Posts Tagged ‘ Other ’

A recent post that was highly ranked on Hacker News complained about common git workflows causing him serious pain. While I won’t get into the merit of his user experience complaints, I do want to talk about his specific use-case and how I personally work with it in git. Best I can tell, Mike...
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Since version 0.9, Bundler has had a feature called “groups”. The purpose of this feature is to allow you to specify groups of dependencies which may be used in certain situations, but not in others. For instance, you may use ActiveMerchant only in production. In this case, you could say: group :production do gem...
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UPDATE: The DataObjects drivers, which are used in DataMapper, are now updated to honor default_internal. Let’s keep this moving. Since Ruby 1.9 announced support for encodings, there has been a flurry of activity to make existing libraries encoding aware, and a tornado of confusion as users of Ruby and Rails have tried to make...
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This week saw a flurry of back-and-forth about the future of the web platform. In the “web sucks” camp were Sachin Agarwal of Posterous (The Web Sucks. Browsers need to innovate) and Joe Hewitt (Sachin summarized some of his tweets at @joehewitt agrees with me). Chris Blizzard responded with a few narrow examples of...
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In the beginning, Rubygems made a decision to allow multiple versions of individual gems in the system repository of gems. This allowed people to use whatever versions of gems they needed for individual scripts, without having to partition the gems for specific purposes. This was a nice starting place. Being able to just install...
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Bundler has inadvertantly exposed a number of require order issues in existing gems. I figured I’d take the opportunity to talk about them. There are basically two kinds of gem ordering issues: Missing Requires Imagine a gem that uses nokogiri, but never requires it. Instead, it assumes that something that is required before it...
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When you clone a repository containing a Unix tool (or download a tarball), there’s a standard way to install it. This is expected to work without any other dependencies, on all machines where the tool is supported.$ autoconf $ ./configure $ make $ sudo make installThis provides a standard way to download, build and install Unix tools....
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When I was first getting started with Ruby, I heard a lot of talk about blocks, and how you could “cast” them to Procs by using the & operator when calling methods. Last week, in comments about my last post (Ruby is NOT a Callable Oriented Language (It’s Object Oriented)), I heard that claim...
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I recently ran across a presentation entitled Python vs. Ruby: A Battle to the Death. I didn’t consider it to be a particularly fair battle, and may well reply in more detail in a later post. However, what struck me as most worthy of explanation was the presenter’s concern about the fact that Procs are...
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In the past week, I read a couple of posts that made me really want to respond with a coherent explanation of how I build modular Ruby code. The first post, by Nick Kallen of Twitter, gushed about the benefits of PerQueryTimingOutQueryFactory and called out Ruby (and a slew of other “hipster” languages) for using...
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