People Driven Development

At every stage of the software development process, I like to put people first. I’m deliberately using the generic word people instead of the more common users. In many cases the decision will indeed affect end-users, because designing a good user experience (UX) is fundamental to the production of quality software; however my point is to try to consider all the people who may be affected by a given...

Why I Won’t Be Publishing New ‘Great Ruby Shootouts’

Someone on Twitter politely asked me when I was going to run a new Ruby shootout. I replied that I wasn’t planning to. This got me thinking though that he might not be the only reader wondering about this point, so I thought I’d share a few of the reasons behind my decision not to carry on with this series. My last shootout (over two years ago now) and its predecessors were highly popular posts. In fact,...

New Release of the Ruby Driver and Rails Adapter for DB2

The API team at IBM recently released a new update for the ibm_db gem, which includes both the Ruby driver and the Rails adapter for DB2 (and Informix). This coincides with the release of the latest major upgrade to DB2 LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows), which is now up to version 10.1. ibm_db 2.5.10 adds support for Rails 3.2 and fixes a few minor bugs that have been reported by the community. New features such as Time...

RubyMotion brings serious Ruby development to the iOS world

For the past several months I’ve been involved with, but unable to publicly discuss, an exciting project called RubyMotion. My friend Laurent Sansonetti, creator of MacRuby, has now officially launched a serious alternative to Objective-C for iPhone and iPad development. RubyMotion is not a bridge; it actually generates native applications that are as fast as the ones written in Objective-C . You can check...

Discount coupon for the Rails Tutorial (2nd Edition)

Contrary to what you may have been led to believe, learning Rails from scratch can be challenging. The framework and surrounding ecosystem have evolved so much that the experience of getting started now in 2012 is far more daunting than the one we early adopters encountered back in 2004 or 2005. Yes, things are more polished in many regards, but there are also so many more choices to be made. What login library...

On the Usability of Codecademy

I asked a friend of mine (who isn’t a coder) if she could try out the amazing Codecademy for me. She is a smart person, but again, she isn’t a programmer. I thought Codecademy would be a great way to introduce her to programming for the web. As a programmer, I thought it was extremely well made and assumed it would work for anyone. She landed on the homepage and read the instructions. She wrote her...

A Big List of Interesting Programming Books Released in 2011

The following is a list of 48 interesting programming books that were released in 2011. While technically some of them are only programming-related and not about coding per se, each one is sure to be of interest to some programmers. As some of you know, I run a service called Any New Books?, which emails you a list of new books that are related to the categories of your choice each week. For the most part I pulled...

Download DB2 Express-C 9.7.5

IBM recently released a new edition of DB2 Express-C, the free edition of their powerful commercial database. You can grab DB2 Express-C 9.7.5 for Linux, Unix, and Windows here. This new version includes support for Oracle compatibility (which was previously only available for commercial editions), and a few other features, including an enhanced db shell known as CLP+. If you downloaded DB2 in the past, take this...

Speeding up queries by a factor of 100 or more with DB2 Text Search

During a recent Rails project at IBM we had to deal with a large table consisting of customers. The table is made up of legacy enterprise data, and contains close to a million records. Among many other fields, the table Customers includes a column name defined as VARCHAR. name is used to store company names. One of the requirements for the project was to implement a Google Suggest-like feature. That is, when...

The need for good vocational schools for programmers

A rigorous computer science education is certainly beneficial to programmers. It provides you with the ability to see the bigger picture, and a more in-depth understanding of many topics that will ultimately make you a better developer. I would argue however that it is far from actually being necessity. For many programming jobs, a computer science education is akin to having a mechanical engineering degree when...

Programming in Objective-C, 3rd Edition is out

Addison-Wesley quietly released the third edition of their Programming in Objective-C book (USA | UK | Canada). I own the first edition of the book and it’s stellar, so I’m really looking forward to reading this upgraded version which includes the latest changes to the language, the main IDE (XCode), and the Foundation framework for developing Mac, iPad, and iPhone...

jQuery Air: An outstanding introduction to jQuery

Code School is a fascinating new provider of video lessons for programmers. In the past I reviewed their Rails Best Practices course and certainly didn’t hide the fact that I’m a fan of their approach. It combines modular video lessons with practical exercises (called challenges), game-like rewards with scores and virtual badges, and also includes a handy support forum in case you get stuck. Recently Code...

IBM is Looking for a University Student with PHP skills in Toronto

My team is looking for a student for a paid internship, which will last for up to 18 months. The candidate should be legally permitted to work in Canada, as the location for this internship will be the IBM Toronto Software Lab in Markham, Ontario. PHP is a required skill for this position. If you have experience with cloud computing (Amazon EC2), relational databases, open source contribution, and/or Moodle, that...

10 Ruby One Liners to Impress Your Friends

Someone came up with a list of 10 one-liner examples that are meant to showcase Scala’s expressiveness. A CoffeeScript version quickly emerged, so I thought I’d publish a Ruby one. I find Ruby’s syntax to be a bit cleaner than Scala’s, but the substance (at least as far as these examples are concerned) is relatively similar. Multiply each item in a list by 2 (1..10).map { |n| n * 2 } Sum a list of...

Interview with the Compilr.com team

1. For those who don’t know, what is an online compiler and how did you come up with the idea? An online compiler, or online IDE is a full software development environment on the web. This allows us programmers to develop from a wider range of machines without any software installations, and to always have our code handy whenever we may need it. There are a wide range of online compiler’s out there...

Installing Python, Django, and DB2 on Ubuntu 11.04

Note: This is the Python version of the Ruby guide I just published. In this brief tutorial I’ll show you how to create a complete Python and Django setup for DB2 on Ubuntu. By following my step-by-step instructions, you’ll be able to install the following components: Python easy_install Django DB2 Express-C 9.7.4 The official Python driver, dbi module, and Django adapter for DB2 Installing Python and...

Installing Ruby on Rails and DB2 on Ubuntu 11.04

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a complete Ruby on Rails setup for DB2 on Ubuntu. Following my step-by-step instructions, you’ll be able to install the following components: Ruby 1.8.7 Rubygems Ruby on Rails DB2 Express-C 9.7.4 The official Ruby driver and Rails adapter for DB2 Installing Ruby We are going to install Ruby 1.8.7 using the Debian packages that are available in the default...

Google I/O developer event in Waterloo, Canada

I just received an email from one of my contacts at Google in regards to an upcoming Google I/O conference in Waterloo, Ontario. I’m posting their announcement here in case you are in the area on May 10, 2011 and are interested in this free event: Google I/O 2011 is bringing together thousands of developers to share, learn and create; we want you to be part of of this free developer event! On Tuesday May 10th,...

Review of Rails Best Practices

Over the weekend I had a chance to play around a bit with Rails Best Practices, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts I had regarding it. In the startup world we often debate the merit of ideas vs execution. In this particular case, the idea behind this product is pretty straightforward. It’s a video course about common idioms and best practices in Rails, that helps you learn how to refactor bad Rails...

Running Radiant CMS on DB2 in the Cloud

In this article I will show you how to set up and run Radiant CMS on DB2 Express-C in the Cloud. Before getting started, let’s define each of these components: Radiant CMS is a popular, easy to use open source Content Management System (CMS) that’s written in Ruby on Rails. DB2 Express-C is a fully functional, free edition of DB2 which can be used in production for commercial purposes. Cloud, in this particular...