People love Ruby… “is that appropriate?” Dave Thomas asks, “is a software tool something that should be the object of our love?”
“programmers, like poets, constantly start with a blank piece of paper… so we have to love our tools, since otherwise we grow frustrated and that ends up showing in our work.”
I enjoyed Dave Thomas’ [...]
Open Source Digital Voting is a digital public works project, pulling together a community of developers and designers to make it so we have software and hardware that we can trust to support all aspects of the voting process.
They have released this compelling video about the project:
I believe that open source is the [...]
Here’s a little form for sending an XML post in OpenLaszlo. This is a useful little snippet of code, since as if you get one little content header or something wrong, Rails will be unforgiving with its powerful, yet strict implementation of REST.
What the app looks like (enter text in the top, click the [...]
Rails enables web services by default, which is pretty awesome, and I’ve been relying on that for a while. It is pretty nifty how Rails will magically parse XML post parameters, create an in-memory object and then save that object to the database without your having to write one line of code. However, [...]
Inspired by the SlideShare story contest, I created a presentation that tells the story of how we came to create a workshop to teach women ruby and how things have turned out so far.
Once Upon A Time
View more from Sarah Allen.
If you like the presentation, you can vote at SlideShare.
Read more about the workshop.
I believe that open source provides a new model for changing the way things are. It is exciting to work with so many people who are experienced with working together in eclectic collections of motivated individuals. It is a new way of getting things done and it is neat to see it applied [...]
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb writes about twitter in the classroom (via Koichi C, thanks @wolframarnold). He leads with a detailed story about University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, who uses twitter to create a dynamic and vibrant discussion in a large class of 90 students. She projects TweetDeck in the front [...]
It is not a new idea to mix synchronous and asynchronous communication, in other words, mixing real-time, like chat, and store & forward, like email. I have always felt that Internet communications application are oddly modal, where the UI is largely driven by the protocol. It was one of the things that led [...]