I'm a Ruby developer in San Francisco. This is my programming blog.
March 2010
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LARubyConf Slides Posted

Just finished my LA Ruby Conf talk and I wanted to post a few resources:

Shoes – a simple way to create desktop applications in Ruby. Cross-platform, pure awesome. (code on github)
Hackety Hack – built on Shoes, this is a toolkit specifically for learning how to program.
Small Ruby – learn to program for the smaller set [...]

The First 2010 Ruby Outreach Workshop

…is now open for registration. Last year Sarah Allen and I did three workshops for women and this year we’re going for four. So, if you’d like to learn Rails and can come BOTH Friday, February 26th in the evening AND Saturday, February 27th during the day, go sign up! There are only [...]

Travails with readline

Applies to: Ruby 1.8.7, compiled from source, on OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
I’ve been working on a side project that deals with Japanese text in Ruby. I installed rtranslate, a gem that gives me programmatic access to Google Translate. I wanted to try it out in irb.
>> require ‘rtranslate’
=> true
So far so good.

>> Translate.t(”

Here’s where [...]

Is Agile Too Slow?

You’re Asking The Wrong Question.
I’m in Hawaii for the Aloha on Rails conference. The last session on Monday was a panel moderated by l4rk that included Obie Fernandez, Pat Maddox, Blake Mizerany, and Tammer Saleh. The topic: “Is Agile Too Slow?”
Ostensibly we were there to talk about whether there were any circumstances under which agile [...]

Teaching Ruby to High School Girls

Please post your comments here on my Teaching Kids article.
I wrote an article for the RailsBridge Teaching Kids site about my experience teaching Ruby to high school girls a few weeks ago. Go read it over there!
That site doesn’t have comments, though, so I’m linking back here because I’d like to hear your comments [...]

July/August Ruby workshop registration open!

Registration is now open for the free Ruby workshop for women that Sarah Allen and I are running at the end of July. Please RSVP soon – the last workshop filled up less than 3 days after registration opened.
This is a two-day event open to total programming novices, system administrators, and developers in other languages. [...]

August Workshop Dates Confirmed!

Pivotal Labs will be hosting our next workshop on July 31st and August 1st – that’s Friday evening and Saturday all day.
The format will be similar to our first workshop: Friday night is a mixer and installfest. Attendees bring their laptops, and, with the help of our volunteers, install anything they’re missing to run Rails. [...]

Post-Workshop Hack Session July 1st

For those of you who attended the June workshop, or wish you had, come join me on July 1st for a hack session at Citizen Space.

If you haven’t been to a hack session before, make this your first! A hack session is unstructured time to work on a project or learn something new from the [...]

The First Rails Workshop

Two months ago, Sarah Allen and I started planning a Ruby on Rails outreach workshop for women. Our goal: each participant leaves with a fully-functional development environment, a working application, and some space online to show off their work.
As we got into it we realized it was really, really ambitious. But I am profoundly thrilled [...]

Heroku on Windows

Next month, 80 people with laptops are going to show up and expect me to teach them something about Rails. I want them to see the app they’re writing on the web, but I only have six hours in the workshop (including lunch!) and deployment could easily take that much time by itself. Apache and [...]