My drop in the bucket

Since I got into computer science in college, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking and reading about the gender imbalance in computing. I’ve decided it’s time for me to help fix the problem.

So I’ll be offering a free workshop in San Francisco to reach out to women who want to learn […]

Nginx and subdomains on Engine Yard

System administration and setup are my least favorite part of any project. Today I wanted to set up a wiki on a subdomain – wiki.groupname.com. The main site, a blog, is hosted on an Engine Yard slice that runs nginx. Since I’m usually more of an apache aficionado, I thought I’d note the process.

Request […]

GoGaRuCo, Day 2

Well, I was totally gung-ho about writing up GoGaRuCo Day 1, but it’s taken me a week to get day 2 done.

Part of that was exhaustion – between the conference on Friday and Saturday, the hackathon on Sunday, and, uh, working the five days after that, it’s kind of been full-speed until today. Part […]

Why Rails is Still a Ghetto

(With apologies to Zed.)

A few of the talks at GoGaRuCo were crowdsourced – anyone who wanted to talk about anything put their title and description up on Uservoice. Folks who registered got 10 votes each, and the top vote-getting talks were accepted and scheduled.

Out of this came “CouchDB: Perform Like a Pr0n Star” […]

Object IDs and Fixnums

I’ve been poking around Ruby’s internals, and I found some cool things about the way Ruby represents integers in memory.

Let’s start with the obvious: in Ruby, everything is an object, including integer literals.

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GoGaRuCo, Day 1

It’s pronounced “go-gay-roo-ko.” Did you know? I did not.

Also, let it be known that the Swedish-American Hall is awesome. The grand ballroom just needs a huge fire in the middle with a pig roasting and smoke rising up to the rafters. The chairs look like viking thrones! In non-Scandinavian-related coolness, there’s Ritual coffee at […]