DigitalHobbit

Today, I attended a tech talk by ThoughtWorks’ Ola Bini on JRuby (JRuby Wikipedia entry here).

I keep hearing great things about JRuby (even Matz has good things to say about it), and it’s nice to hear this from the horse’s mouth as well (Ola is one of the JRuby core developers). Apparently the latest version [...]

I had the pleasure of attending a presentation by Yukihiro Matsumoto (aka “Matz”) on Ruby 1.9 today. I had heard that he is a very nice guy, and he definitely came across as very charismatic. He is not particularly fluid in English, and in previous interviews I had heard with him, he often used an [...]

Heroku recently announced a public beta. Heroku is a Rails hosting service with a twist: They offer a fully integrated development and hosting environment. You develop your application using a web based IDE, and it gets automatically deployed to Amazon EC2.

The IDE works surprisingly well. You get a typical file browser that allows you to [...]

Merb 0.9.0 was released 5 days ago. It looks like the download instructions on the homepage have also been updated for 0.9.0. You can now install it as a gem or from source, by checking out the code from the Merb Git repository.

Aside from a more modular design, Merb 0.9 also introduces a more flexible [...]

Yesterday I set up Markdown support for my blog, as I was getting tired of typing <li>, <a href=”…”>, etc. I’ve had my blog for almost four years now, and I can’t believe that I have not done this before. It finally allows me to focus on the actual content while I’m writing a blog [...]

Earlier today, Alex Payne blogged about side projects, which prompted me to write down my own thoughts on this matter, as I had been planning a blog post on this subject for a while. Alex states some of the benefits of having a side project, such as keeping you learning, dealing with different types of [...]

So where was I? Ah yes, in yesterday’s post I left off with me going back to Ruby for my personal projects.

My standard choice for web development has been Ruby on Rails for a while now (although I haven’t had a chance to try Rails 2.0 yet). However, lately I’ve been playing with Merb. Merb [...]

It’s been a while since I last blogged about any technologies I’ve been playing with, so I figured I’m due for an update. I am going to split this into a two-part series: First I will play catch up and talk about the technologies that I’ve played with over the past 6 months or so. [...]