Monthly Archives: April 2009

baby steps and bold moves

Aaron Quint offers a refreshing shift to the broader issue of how to diversify the Ruby community:
Let’s actually make this happen. How can we get more women in software development? How can we bring more women into the Ruby community? I don’t have the answer and honestly, I’m not a fantastic teacher or community organizer. [...]

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golden gate ruby conference

The Golden Gate Ruby Conference was one of the best technical conferences I’ve attended.  In addition to my links (below), you can look at pivotallabs live blogging and justin.tv videos.  Justin.tv, which has a Ruby-powered website, provided full coverage, and videos will be posted on the pivotal labs website.
I really liked the format and venue.  [...]

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gender and sex at gogaruco

The Golden Gate Ruby Conference was almost totally awesome.  There only two sour notes.  First, it was almost unbelievable how few women attended.  With about 200 attendees, six were women.  I have never been to a technical conference with so disproportionately few women.  I can think of all sorts of reasons (along with a number [...]

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open source digital voting software

Josh Susser, organizer of the Golden Gate Ruby Conference, introduced this talk by saying that he wanted to have talks that weren’t only about how we do what we do, but also about why we do what we do. Gregory Miller’s talk “Trust the Vote: An Open Source Digital Public Works Project” addressed [...]

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using ruby to fight aids

We just heard a fantastic talk by Jacqui Maher about her work on the Boabab project, fighting AIDS in Malawi, Africa.
First, she gave us an overview of the AIDS epidemic, especially in Africa:

Africa has 12% of the world’s population, but 60% of the people with AIDs
In Malawi

14% of adults have AIDS
8 people die every hour [...]

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magic scaling sprinkles

Nick Kallen, Twitter, author of popular open-source projects such as NamedScope, Screw.Unit, and Cache-Money, gave a compelling talk yesterday at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference.  Nick’s easy-going presentation style and thoughtfully prepared examples made a complex topic easy to follow.  Nonetheless, my notes are sparse since most of my attention was devoted to listening and [...]

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how to write fast ruby code

Carl Lerche talks about how to write fast ruby code. Yes, ruby is scalable. Scaling != speed. Focus of this talk is on speed. Ruby is fast enough for the vast majority of use cases.
“Slow code is your fault.”
How can I write fast code?
1. Write slow code: well-structured code that is easy to [...]

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ruby application frameworks

Panel discussion at Golden Gate Ruby Conference
Shoes, Tim Elliott, framework for creating GUI apps. It is an application that embeds Ruby. It is written in C. It is designed to lower to bar for programming and make it fun. Not an MVC framework. Writing an app is more like writing a [...]

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ruby proxies

Ilya Grigorik, gave a very informative talk “Ruby Proxies for Scale, Performance, and Monitoring”
Ilya describes a proxy server as his new favorite hammer. I can think of lots of cases where having an easy way to write a proxy server would come in handy. Mostly what we think of when we think of [...]

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sandbox for ruby code

David Stevenson, flouri.sh, talk “Playing With Fire: Running Uploaded Ruby Code in a Sandbox” at Golden Gate Ruby Conference
A sandbox needs to:

Limit functionality
Make it so code can’t break out
Separate code space
Bounded execution time

Sandbox gems

Freaky-freaky sandbox gem (MRI Ruby): it’s a gem, but you can’t use gem install.  No support for 1.8.7 and later.
JavaSand gem (JRuby): [...]

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