Archive for the 'programming' Category

Shoes, a new Ruby GUI toolkit

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Last year I gave a talk on Ruby GUI toolkits, and concluded that none of those I looked at were compellingly slick or mature. There is a new player on the field now (thus certainly not mature, but interesting nonetheless): Shoes, from why the lucky stiff.
Shoes creates native applications with a Web feel. It is […]

Great Developers, Projects That Sound Boring

Wednesday, October 31st, 2007

I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky for years, though I haven’t agreed with everything he’s written, and even mocked him a bit. Joel has written at length on his web site and in print about attracting the best developers, and one aspect of that has bothered me:
How do you attract top developers to work […]

Growing a Language, by Guy Steele

Tuesday, October 16th, 2007

This is an oldie-but-goodie: Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” talk from OOPSLA 1998.
It is amazing to me that Guy, whose is something of a legend in language design, and who thinks so clearly about what makes a good language, was also key in designing Java. Java has been extremely slow to grow in the sense […]

A Brief Introduction to Distributed Version Control

Thursday, October 11th, 2007

Last night at SLUUG, I have a talk on distributed source control tools. It was quite introductory, but the notes (below) may still be helpful. These notes were on a handout at the talk, as usual I didn’t use slides.
Unfortunately I didn’t get an audio recording of this talk, so no transcript either.
About 30 people […]

Fix It So It Stays Fixed: An Example

Monday, October 1st, 2007

A recurring theme in our projects is a desire to “fix things so they stay fixed”. I have in mind writing about that idea in detail later, but for now I’ll start with an example of how to do so.
A common and useful thing to do with disk storage space is to keep old copies […]

Upcoming talk: Intro to Distributed Source Control

Monday, October 1st, 2007

Where: SLUUG (though my talk is not listed on the site yet)
When: October 10th, meeting starts at 6:30 PM
I’ll introduce distributed source control tools:

A short tour of the basic use of git, bzr, and hg (Mercurial)
Thoughts on why you’d want to use a distributed source control tool at all, vs. a centralized system like SVN […]