Ruby on Rails

Programming with a love of the implicit

It’s always better to be explicit! That’s pretty much a programming truism. Rarely…

Horses for courses

It’s no more sensible to talk about a single category of programmers than it is a single category of writers. Yes, an…

Learning and mastering isn’t the same

When I first began making applications for the web, getting started was hard. Just figuring…

Provide sharp knives

Ruby includes a lot of sharp knives in its drawer of features. Not by accident, but by design. The most famous is monkey patching: The power to change existing classes and methods.

This power has frequently been derided as simply too much for mere mortal programmers…

Ruby has been fast enough for 13 years

When I started programming Ruby, it was on an Apple iBook G4/800. That beautiful 12” powerhouse of a 800 MHz PowerPC with a rocking 256MB of RAM. A lovely computer that was not only fast enough to run Ruby, but a pleasure to develop the first version of both…

All my RailsConf keynotes