Legacy blog (2004–2016). This blog is no longer updated. For current content, visit DigitalHobbit's RPG Blog (tabletop RPGs) or GammaVibe (engineering & entrepreneurship).

Heroku

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 create new files / folders or open, rename, move, or delete existing files /folders....

February 20, 2008 · 3 min · 614 words · DigitalHobbit

Matz / Ruby 1.9

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 interpreter. But I was impressed that he actually delivered the presentation (and Q&A) in English....

February 20, 2008 · 2 min · 342 words · DigitalHobbit

Merb 0.9.0 Released

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 application layout. Previously, the layout was essentially the same as for a Rails app....

February 18, 2008 · 2 min · 288 words · DigitalHobbit

Side Projects and Passion

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....

February 18, 2008 · 4 min · 691 words · DigitalHobbit

Technology Update (Part 2: Merb & More)

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....

February 13, 2008 · 4 min · 737 words · DigitalHobbit