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....
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....
Yesterday I set up Markdown support for my blog, as I was getting tired of typing , , 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 post, without having to contort my fingers to type the necessary HTML tags....
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....
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....