It’s no secret now that Compass is one of my favourite Ruby technologies. I wrote about it in great length on Tenthline’s blog and I spoke about it with Anita Kuno at Ruby Job Fair. It’s simply one of the best web design tools I’ve ever used, bar none. It offers all of the benefits of using CSS frameworks while allowing you to stay in control of your markup.
Posts Tagged ‘Ruby’
Future Ruby
(Programming) July 2nd, 2009Last year, I attended my first computing conference ever: RubyFringe. It was really more of an “un-conference”, organized by everybody’s favourite Toronto Ruby shop, Unspace.
The whole experience was fantastic. Giles Bowkett kept us in our seats past lunch with his thought-provoking presentation which mixed his slick Ruby MIDI generator, Archaeopteryx, with a call to action so moving that we could not help rising from our seats to give him a standing ovation. Nick Sieger threw us a curveball with a presentation on the history of jazz music and how it relates to programming. RubyFringe was a weekend to remember for everybody involved.
So, I was incredibly excited when Pete Forde and Meghann Millard announced that they would be running another Ruby conference in Toronto: Future Ruby. It’s not quite meant to be a RubyFringe sequel; really, something as uniquely awesome as RubyFringe will never be replicated again. But in any case I bought my ticket almost the very moment they went on sale.
Future Ruby will be next week and I will be there. Hope to see you there too!
Radiant CMS in Japanese
(Japan, Programming) June 17th, 2009Recently, I started a project to translate Radiant CMS into Japanese. I started with Keith Bingman’s Radiant fork and added a Japanese message bundle. Since then, Hirotaka Mizutani has been offering his help with the translation as well.
Back from Ruby Job Fair
(Miscellaneous) June 9th, 2009In short, Ruby Job Fair was awesome!
The turnout from the Toronto Ruby community was excellent and I made and strengthened a lot of professional connections. I even got some compliments on my display and print-outs! Just in case you missed them, I’ll be posting them here soon.
It did feel like there were more developers than people looking to hire developers, but this was just the first of what I’m sure will be many such events. In any case, I did hand out a lot of my brand new business cards and a few of my resumes.
I can’t wait for FutureRuby!
Ruby Job Fair
(Programming) June 6th, 2009Ruby Job Fair will be held today from 11am to 6pm at the Gladstone Hotel in downtown Toronto. At this job fair, Rubyists looking for work will be presenting themselves and their skills without computers or smartphones. We’ve been asked to leave our MacBooks at home. Instead, our presentations will be made in old-school Science Fair style.
It’s a unique premise for an event that I’m pretty sure only Pete Forde’s imagination could cook up and I’m proud to announce that I’ll be taking part in it. I will have a posterboard and two binders showcasing my skills and previous work and I’ll also have an extra special surprise. What’s the surprise? Stop by and see! =)
Hope to see you at the Job Fair!
Autotest for Mac OS X – Now with less suck!
(Programming) May 29th, 2009The autotest-fsevent and autotest-growl gems bring considerable improvements to ZenTest’s autotest for Mac OS X users.
autotest-fsevent teaches autotest a new trick: using FSEvent (provided in Mac OS X 10.5.x) instead of ordinary filesystem polling. This means less CPU usage because FSEvent broadcasts filesystem changes, making active and periodic polling unnecessary.
autotest-growl enhances the Growl support that autotest comes with by adding support for Growling results for tests (using Test::Unit), specs (using RSpec), and features (using Cucumber) and adding pretty Ruby logos to the notifications.
If you use Mac OS X and autotest, I highly recommend that you try these gems out today:
sudo gem install autotest-fsevent sudo gem install autotest-growl
One caveat: if you’re using ZenTest 4.0.0 or older, you need to do a bit of trickery to get autotest-growl to work properly. These versions of ZenTest come with their own autotest Growl plugin, so you need to make sure you’re requiring the Growl support from autotest-growl instead of ZenTest’s own. Here’s what I ended up writing in my ~/.autotest file:
require '/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/autotest-growl-0.1.0/lib/autotest/growl.rb'
