Vale David E.

There's too much death going around right now.

The ruby world has been rocked by the death of of Jim Weirich (kind man, great teacher and original writer of rake)...

But for me, I have to say this is overshadowed by two deaths much closer to home.

About 3 weeks ago, my grandfather died.

I was never really close to him, but his passing sent ripples through my family. Even my close family came back from the states to attend the funeral and be with my grandmother.

But my grandfather had made it to 96. He was well-travelled and had managed to complete his book on lay evangelism - which was the end result of his life's work in his church. He lived a long, full life.

This morning, my uncle gave up his struggle with cancer.

He was only 70, and the world is that much less bright without him in it.

He was kind and generous, and always made me laugh. He brought joy and love back to my aunt - whom he married only a few short months ago (right after the diagnosis).

He was way too young to die.

Link: Stack Overflow Goes Down, Programmers Around The World Panic

StackOverflow went down on Sunday. It's back up now, but it sure serves as a reminder of how much we've come to rely on this truly awesome resource.

The article above shows some of the (inevitable) humour that flowed from the event... but it does leave me with that feeling that we're whistling nervously in the dark - what if it went away for reals?

Link: a deeper look at ruby's enumerable

Have you ever needed to load a VERY large file in ruby? No I don't mean your 500 line rails model. I mean a several gig binary or text file.

Try it. Watch your machine become unresponsive. Cry a little inside. Then reach for enumerable.

Ruby's Enumerable module gives you a way of iterating over collections in a lazy manner, loading only what you need, when you need it. But it gives us so much more than that.

rubylove has written a great, in-depth look into enumerable with: A Deeper Look at Ruby's Enumerable

Gamification on coursera

Kevin Werbach's coursera course on gamification is restarting again!

He's the bloke who wrote For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize Your Business - and the gamification course had amazing reviews.

I started it too late last time to fully participate - and now I get another chance!

it's only just begun - so there's still time to sign up without missing out on any of the assignments or the option to get a certification.

Teaching at fishburners

If you're wondering why I've been so quiet... I'm currently teaching the "Immersive web development" course for General Assembly at fishburners, in Ultimo

This is a 12-week course covering the full stack of web development. Students learn ruby, HTML, CSS, SQL, sinatra, rails, javascript and several javascript frameworks.They complete three personal projects as well as many small homework projects. They also get an introduction to the ruby/rails and startup communities (especially via fishburners).

I'm teaching the course - and teaching is, for me, a brand new skill. While they learn rails, I get to learn how to structure and plan lessons, and how to deal with multiple levels of understanding.

It's tough - which is what I expected. I have to plan 40 hours of talking... every weekend - and brush up on every aspect of what I'm teaching so I can answer the tricky questions.

This essentially means I'm working 6 days a week, and the teaching itself drains a fair bit out of me.

So if you're wondering why I'm a bit quiet atm... that's why

Open Source Software is Anarchism*

There is No Governing body

People come together purely through enlightened self-interest to build something useful

Yes there are freeloaders
yes there is chaos
yes standards vary

But some amazing stuff gets built despite all that.

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* Note: anarchism != anarchy... go look it up, if you've never heard of it before...

No. it wouldn't work as a form of government for obvious reasons (ie people are still people)... but that isn't the point I'm trying to make here.

In the land of the blind

In the land of the blind
the one-eyed man is burnt at the stake
for asserting the heresy of light in our land of blessed darkness

Twitter bootstrap - for quick and easy design

If you're anything like me, for a graphics designer you make a great web developer.

My past attempts at design have run the gamut from "geocities" to "unicorn vomit", and I've become increasingly minimalist in an attempt to rectify that

-> less design == less unicorn-puke == win!

But it still leaves my sites looking like crayon-drawn whitesites

It's a long way from there to the current industry requirements of a clean, flexible, responsive design - able to handle mega-huge desktop-monitors and tiny smart-phones alike while looking sleek and professional... and I had resigned myself to basically just not sucking too badly and hoping my sites were useful enough for people to get past the ugly-duckling look.

but now I've found bootstrap. It lets you quickly and easily build a fully-responsive all-devices-ready design with very little graphic-design nous required. From a full grid-based system (to easily build columns that will nicely collapse on smaller screens), to all sorts of components - navbars, breadcrumbs, panels, lists of linked thumbnail images... the list is pretty huge.

Don't be put off by the "oh my god PURPLE" look of their website - this is a tool worth using.

The getting started guide is where to begin.

There's a number of pre-built templates on bootply templates that even if you don't like, you can cannibalise for the various pieces you want.

You can also buy a whole bunch of pre-packaged, professional themes (for about $12 each) from WrapBootstrap to kickstart your website design. Though be aware they are mostly built on Bootstrap 2

If you're building this stuff in rails, there's a whole bunch of bootsrap-related gems - which mean you don't have to download the css/js versions of bootstrap and mix them all into your assets directory.

Ryan Bates' railscast (see below) uses seyhunak / twitter-bootstrap-rails, which seems to have a whole bunch of neat generators for quickly throwing up layouts. I prefer not mixing bootstrap's Less with the existing SASS, and so have gone for the sass-based gem: bootstrap-sass gem.

I suspect you can combine these two powers for good by using the generators of twitter-bootstrap with the sass-based assets of bootstrap-sass... but have yet to try it (let me know if you do).

There's also a great overview of rails and twitter bootstrap with a related RailsApp that goes into far more depth (I haven't had a look at that yet).

and Ryan Bates has done a railscast on twitter bootstrap basics, and a pro-only railscast: more on twitter bootstrap

enjoy...

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Note: Bootstrap version 3 has recently been released, and a lot of the tutorials, railscasts etc are based on version 2. Bootply has a Bootstrap 3 migration guide if you want a reference to what has changed.

Link: loading-icon generator

Load info is a neat website that lets you generate your own loading icon.

The first page has a hypnotising array of load-icons to choose. Click on one and it'll bring up a box that lets you choose the size and colours you want and it'll generate you a customised animated gif you can use.

Link: exploring emotion in github commit messages

Just a bit of fun for the day: Exploring Expressions of Emotions in GitHub Commit Messages

For example, here's the relative list of angry commits by programming language:

Zen and the Art of Western Rationality

Zen seems to have, as central to its dogma, a mystery tradition. ie it makes all its teachings appear incredibly mysterious in what appears to be an effort to make it seem harder to attain - and thus weed out those not willing to work for the enlightenment it proffers.

at least this is how it seems to western thinking. I've known a number of people who have fallen into what I believe is the trap of thinking that zen actually *is* a mysterious hidden secret that can only be approached in a non-rational way...

The reality is that zen is a very good way of switching off that part of the mind that gets in the way of thinking about the things that zen teaches... however, its not the only way.

As they say in zen - zen is not the way, but it approaches the way.

ie it's a good way of starting out, but it won't get you all the way there.

and (unlike the smugness of certain woo-woo types would lead you to believe) it's not the *only* way of reaching The Way.

It's my contention that it is just as possible to work your way there, starting with traditional western rationality/philosophy.

Here's an example pulled from zen:

A teacher once said "this is my short staff. If I call it a short staff, I deny its reality, but if I do not call it a short staff, I deny its fact, so what do I call it?"

It sounds incredibly mysterious. It's a mind-puzzle that you must work out for yourself - and if you are starting from scratch, it may take years of meditation to get to an answer... or you may grasp it in a second.

This is why it seems mysterious, like a great hidden secret that must be very valuable and thus you can feel all smug about knowing...

However, this koan contains some truths which are quite easily expressed in Western rationality also, and I believe it's more valuable to share those truths than to remain "terribly mysterious".

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This koan, to me, expresses the map vs territory problem.

The map is not the territory, and yet it is the territory - just not *all* of the territory. The territory is represented by the map, but it is not defined by the map. Change the map (say, pencil in a new road) and the territory will not change (the new road does not spontaneously appear). Change the territory, and the map must be changed to match or lose it's connection with the territory.

Yet the map (if properly drawn) is the territory also - that road connects to this one in just such a way. If you follow the pattern of roads on the map, you will arrive at the destination that the map says you will.

The territory contains those facts that are within the map, but it *is not* the map itself. The map contains facts which are defined in the territory. You can recognise the territory by looking at the map - but the territory is so much more. It contains trees and roof-tiles and many other things that are not in the map.

The map is not the territory, and the territory is not the map

If I look at a map of england and say that this is england I will deny the reality of england. But if I look at the map and say that it is not england, then I deny the fact that the map is of england.

The map is the territory and is not the territory

but using the map you can approach the territory, but it is not the territory.

It does and does not have "england-nature"...

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To get back to the koan... the object that the teacher is holding out is a short staff - that is the fact. If he said "this is not a short staff" then he would be denying the fact of it actually being a good example of a short staff.

However - if he broke it in half (so that it was no longer a short staff), it wouldn't be like there was no longer any short staves in the world. Thus you cannot say that is is "the" short staff. Other short staves are not defined by the properties of the object in the teacher's hand.

The name "short staff" is just a reference to it... but not a definitive one. It is not the same short staff as, say another one lying on the floor over there. If I can point to each and say "this is a short staff" then you are not naming a thing, only categorising it.

Therefore if you name it "short staff" you deny the reality of it being something *more* than a short staff.

The phrase "short staff" is the map that lets us recognise "things that have the short-staff property"... but it is not the short staff itself.

Now - perhaps you got something different from the short-staff koan. If so, instead of being "all zen and mysterious" about it, I implore you to figure out what it is you've learned... and share it with the rest of us.

Link: Awesome guides to building a functional rails app

Rails girls is a group dedicated to training up the next generation of Rails developers... who happen to be women.

They tend to run over a weekend and get women of all backgrounds (but without rails experience) to build a rails app from scratch.

They have a set of materials that is brief, but quite impressive - and if you follow them through step-by-step it's a quick tutorial on how to get a pretty decently functional Rails app off the ground.

Start with the App tutorial to get it up and running with a simple scaffold, to add some basic styling with bootstrap, and add picture-uploads with carrierwave.

Then follow the set of guides (links are at the bottom of the app-tutorial page) to get it up on heroku, to add authentication with devise, to use geocoding to add your widgets to a map, to create thumbnails for your uploaded images and more.

With just the above you can get a fairly decent rails app built for most purposes in a day or so.

Putting your heroku repo on github

When I set up a new quick-and-dirty app on heroku... I often also want to put my code up on github.

I was really surprised this simple process wasn't covered in the otherwise pretty excellent Getting started with Rails 4 post on heroku.

It's pretty straightforward, so here it is.

If you follow the instructions as per the getting started guide (above), you'll have a local git repo, and it'll be tracking the heroku remote as "heroku". which means there's no problem with using the bog standard "origin" for your github repo version.

So from there

Step 1 create a new repo on github

1. Go to your github page eg this is the github page for me: taryneast's github
2. Click on the "repositories" tab
3. Click the green "new" button
4. Give it a name and, optionally, a description
5. Click "create repository"

Step 2 - link it to your heroku app

1. Go to your heroku app's settings page. this will be something like: https://dashboard.heroku.com/apps/<myapp>/settings
2. About halfway down you can add your repo-name. It'll be <mygitusername>/<mygitrepo>
3. Click save

Step 3 - link your local repo to the github remote

1. open a terminal in your rails app's root directory
2. type git remote add origin git@github.com:<mygitusername>/<mygitrepo>.git
3. git push -u origin master

Your heroku app is now on github.

You can continue to push to heroku with:
git push heroku master
and to github with:
git push origin master

Levelling up in Ruby/Rails - for free.

So, I've recently found myself back on the job market... at least I will be, but I first want to re-sharpen my skills. I've been working in legacy Rails for a while now, and I want to make sure I'm au fait with the latest and greatest the ruby+rails world has to offer.

But when I went looking for courses - there's not a lot on offer for experienced rails devs. Most rails courses are pitched at complete beginners wanting to become a rails dev. Fair enough, but what can I do to polish my existing skills?

Thankfully, some more digging produced a nice set of related online tutorials and screencasts that will get me ship-shape in no time, and for far less than I expected

NewRelic CodeSchool offer

NewRelic currently has an offer whereby if you deploy a new site with NewRelic installed, you can get a free month of CodeSchool. Now, NewRelic is an awesomely useful tool for giving you extremely useful metrics for your site. They even have a free account - and to set this all up, you can roll out a simple site to heroku (also for free) with the new_relic gem installed and away you go.

You can then sign up for a free CodeSchool account (which will give you access to the basic level free courses), and sometime in the near future - you'll get an email from NewRelic with a special promotion code to give you your free month at CodeSchool.

CodeSchool = Rails for Zombies!

So once you've got a month of code school - you can start to work your way through the courses. Starting with the simple "Try ruby" course and through their funny "Rails for Zombies" courses all the way through Rails testing and best practices and some advanced topics of Ruby.

I was happy to discover that even in the simplest ruby course there was one or two things I'd never seen before - so they're all worth the time (but you can skip ahead to the challenges if they're too simple for you).

But the courses don't just cover Ruby/Rails, they also have a series for Javascript, HTML5, CSS3 and even iOS development. Which I'll be availing myself of for the next month - and will almost certainly spring for longer until I've done them all!

From zombies to RailsCasts

I was even happier to discover, that as a "prize" for finishing the "Rails for zombies 2" course, you get one month of a Railscasts Pro account.

Now RailsCasts was where I was planning on heading next anyway - I followed RailsCasts religiously in my early years of developing Rails, and learned a hell of a lot thereby. The number of screencasts that Ryan Bates has done by now is simply staggering. They cover a huge range of topics from detailed aspects of developing Rails (eg tagging or nested forms), to most of the commonly-used tools, and it's great place to go if you want help on a particular topic. To get access to a free month of these on a pro account is wonderful icing on top of the CodeSchool month.

Other CodeSchool courses give you other freebies, and discounts on books etc too, along with lots of links to other amazingly useful resources - so my reading list has suffered a cambrian-explosion this week. I'll keep you tuned if I dig out any further fabulous free offers.

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Update: you can now get 3 months of code school for free

It's a limited offer... here's a link: 3 months of codeschool

Putting a price on your technical debt

Ben Orenstein has written an interesting article: How much should global variables cost?.

It's basically a price-list for different kinds of technical debt, and you can use it to calculate the "cost" that each of your commits adds to your codebase. By actually putting a dollar amount on each "violation" - you can get a good, visceral feel for what you're doing.

As he points out - you can still choose whether or not to keep something (sometimes you really do need to do something that would otherwise be considered a no-no), as long as you can "afford" it.

I think it's an interesting way of looking at the problem. I'd like to see you regaining points for fixing/refactoring similar code-violations out of the project too :)

Link: don't publish your secret keys on github

I probably don't really need to tell you that it's dangerous to publish secret keys on a public website... but which key am I talking about here?

  # this one...
  MyApp::Application.config.secret_key_base = 'fb636477f014943b9cf2d202f9da4349a580fbb9521ef38d8dc0111ae933a10bfec732ce7d563a854db1663ba00af1db21d06d6764d84a88d0a6286bcd2299e2'

It's one of those things that often gets overlooked...

  rails new
  git add .
  git push

Bam!

But if you're on heroku, rather than deploying to your own hosted site (where you can easily drop config files into a shared directory), how do you have a secret key?

Here's a great little gist that will show you how to set it up on an environment variable.

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Update/gotcha

Don't forget, that if you put more than one of these into your .env file... you need to append to the file or you just overwrote your secret key (oops)

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Further update

If you're on heroku and putting one of these environment variables into code that will be evaluated at compile-time (eg config/initializers/devise.rb for instance) you will need to switch on heroku's "compile time environment variable" option: user-env-compile or you will not even be able to deploy your site.

This feature allows your environment variables to be available during compilation of the slug (which is when things like bundler, asset-compilation etc are run)

Note that this is an experimental heroku:labs feature - so blah blah use at your own risk blah...

Gotcha: irb, multi-line strings and "Display all 309 possibilities? (y or n)"

Small thing I figured out. I was in irb and trying to copy/paste some text into a multi-line string to play with gsub, and it kept exploding halfway through and showing the message:

Display all 309 possibilities? (y or n)

instead of actually allowing me to create a multi-line string.

Turns out, irb still responds to tab-completion even if you're halfway through creating a multi-line string.

This kinda sucks if you want a string that contains tabs - but don't want to manually type the whole string (including tabs) yourself as you go along.

To fix it, I copy/pasted the text into vim and used :retab to replace the tabs with spaces before copying it back into the string in irb... its a hack, but it worked for my purposes.

Any thoughts on a better solution?

Link: alias vs alias_method

If you ever wondered what the difference was, this quick post by Neeraj Singh will show you the difference between alias and alias_method

TL;DR:

• alias_method is slightly more flexible accepting strings or symbols
• alias_method will redefine local methods at runtime - which means you can override the aliased method in a subclass and alias_method will pick this up
• alias will keep the original scope when aliasing - so even if you override the method in a subclass, the aliased method will refer to the parent's original method
• alias works nicer with rdoc

Don't forget to use a comma for alias_method

Link: ruby-warrior : a fun way to learn a little ruby

I just came across ruby-warrior.

I can thoroughly recommend it as a couple of hours of fun diversion while picking up a few lines of basic ruby.

Its byline is:

"A triumphant quest of adventure, love & destiny all within a few lines of code."

Link: Your boss, the invader from Mars (or how agile transitions can become unhinged by poor buy-in)

If you've ever tried to implement an agile transition in a traditional workplace, you'll know there are many stumbling blocks - one of the greatest being that of the existing stakeholder: Your boss, the invader from Mars explains how change can and should be dealt with by both the SCRUM and kanban approaches to agile development - and how that can easily be messed up by your boss.

The case-study especially strikes a chord with my experiences, describing a shop wanting to "become more agile" but not actually implementing agile processes, instead trying to add the "agile" on top - with a rather apt simile where the agile process are described as "layered over existing dysfunctions as a sort of veneer".

The article then goes on to show various ways in which a boss who is not fully vested in the agile approach can unhinge the transition process... but also lets us learn the various lessons from that so a we can hopefully improve upon it in our own attempts.