Posted by Matt on May 21, 2010
June is quickly approaching and that means one thing… RailsConf. This will be the first professional conference I’ve ever attended and I’m extremely excited for it. I will be taking in the Mobile App Development Studio from Mike Clark and the Rails 3 Ropes Course from the guys at Envy Labs.
I’ve spent most of my time recently working in Cocoa (which I love) and haven’t been able to devote the time I’ve wanted to Rails. I’ve only scratched the surface of Rails 3 but I’m extremely excited for templates. I will happily be dumping ActiveRecord and ERB for DataMapper (maybe CouchRest as well?) and HAML.
I’ve put learning Scala on hiatus for a little while. I’ve started learning Clojure instead. I’ve always had a bit of a hard time with LISP based languages. However, I think I get Clojure’s implementation of it a lot better. I’m using Programming Clojure by Stuart Holloway as my guide. It’s actually a lot of fun when you get into it. I’m still however having trouble reading my own code after not touching it for a few days. All of the parenthesis can be a bit hard to grok.
Here is an example of generating a Fibonacci sequence then summing all even numbers found. This is a potential solution to Project Euler Problem No. 2
#!/usr/bin/env clj
(defn fib
“Fibbonacci sequence for numbers greater than 2”
[n]
((fn
[max, sequence]
(let [sequenceCount (count sequence) firstIndex (- sequenceCount 1) secondIndex (- sequenceCount 2)
newFibNumber (+ (sequence firstIndex) (sequence secondIndex))]
(if (> newFibNumber max)
sequence
(recur max (conj sequence newFibNumber)))))
n [1 1]))
(println (reduce + (filter #(= (rem % 2) 0) (fib 4000000))))
If you want to more about Clojure, definately check out the Programming Clojure book or the Clojure Peepcode Screencast
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Posted by Matt on Mar 03, 2010
Quick update. I now have worked on two iPhone applications for my current employer. I must say I’m very impressed with XCode, the Objective-C language, and the Cocoa Framework. I’m still very new but find that it’s fairly easy to pickup the concept behind iPhone development.
Recently I’ve been looking at open source libraries to enhance the apps I’m creating at work and soon for personal use. I’ve become intrigued by ObjectiveResource and three20.
ObjectiveResource is a framework that adds ActiveResource like features to NSObject (and several other objects) to let you CRUD objects served up by a Rails REST interface. I decided to check it out after seeing Mike Clark would be using it in a training session at RailsConf.
three20 is a set of UI elements and libraries derived from the Facebook iPhone application. The project is from Joe Hewitt who also built the Facebook Connect SDK. I’m excited to try out the TTTableViewController in my apps since it will make loading new information into a UITableView much less painful.
On a side note, getting familiar with iPhone / Objective-C / Cocoa was one of my goals for the year. While I’ll still be learning more about it, I consider my goal complete and now off to goal 2, getting familiar with Scala.
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Posted by Matt on Jan 02, 2010
First off, happy new year to everyone! I’m hoping that 2010 is better than 2009 for everybody.
2009 was a rough year for me personally and professionally. However, it ended on a high note with a new job and new challenges.
In the waining days of 2009, I began my first iPhone application. I’m still very new to Cocoa and Objective-C but I’m enjoying the parts of the language and framework I’ve come across. I’m getting readjusted to the manually memory management. I’ve been spoiled by dynamic languages and automatic garbage collection.
I really want to expand the languages I work with his year. Mind you, I’m definitely staying in the Rails ecosystem, it’s a fantastic framework. However there are some technologies on my radar that I want/will need to work with.
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Posted by Matt on Dec 12, 2009
Short update.
After over two years at Sourcefire, I decided to move on to new adventures. As this year wraps up, I’m sad to leave many colleagues behind but glad to know that I can call many of them my friends.
I began at my new employer Alexander+Tom last week. There I will be growing outside the role of only being a Ruby on Rails developer. I will be taking on new challenges, new platforms, and new programming languages.
Here’s to the future and all of its challenges and rewards. I know that no matter what, I will continue to grow as a developer and a person. Life, like great coding, is always a work in progress.
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Posted by Matt on Nov 13, 2009
On my vacation this week, I had the fortune of talking with some developers about Ruby development. During these conversations, I had the joy of introducing some people to some new Ruby tools for rapid application development and testing.
Before I get into that, I wanted to quickly talk about sharing knowledge. Share whenever possible. It doesn’t matter if its about a programming language, some library, tips, or tricks. The littlest thing can open whole new concepts or generate great ideas.
For today’s blog, I’d like to share some tools and tips I use for Rapid Application Development and Rails Unit Testing.
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