Startup Interviews: Zooppa.com

What follows is an interview with Nicholas Wieland, CTO of Italy-based Zooppa, a fast growing social network for creative types. This is the second in a series of interviews I will carry out with interesting figures from the micro-ISV and startup scene. If you have a compelling story to tell, own or run a tech startup, and would like to be featured, please drop me a line via email. 1. I’d like to start by...

Do you read the Rubyist and Rails Magazine?

Books and magazines have always fascinated me. Perhaps this is due to the fact that until I was nine, my father owned a bookstore and I would spend a lot of my time hanging out in a world of dust jackets and big words. More recently, the internet has brought information sharing to a whole new level and opened up a realm of amazing possibilities. I love this this element of being online to death, but it also means...

New look and feel. Do you like it?

Those who follow this blog through the feed, may not have noticed it, but over the weekend I had a chance to revamp the look of Zen and the Art of Programming. I used a WordPress theme I’d already employed on Math Blog and customized it, basing my changes on the suggestions of the participants of my earlier survey on the subject. I’m not a web designer by any means, but I’m quite happy with the way...

Scaling Rails Screencasts

Within the Rails community, New Relic is a company that doesn’t need any introductions. They are synonymous with performance and reliability, thanks to their RPM product for monitoring, detecting, and fixing Rails application performance problems in real time. What everybody may not have noticed though, is that New Relic started something called RailsLab, a site in which they publish videos and other useful...

Let’s all grow up

A few days ago I wrote a comment on Hacker News. Here it goes. I hate how being harsh has become fashionable. Whatever happened to manners? This spontaneous reaction was in response to a blog that attempted to be humorous by using the word “fucking” multiple times in reference to Adobe’s UIs which were perceived as lacking a native look and feel. I stand behind those words. Acting bitter on the...

DB2 on Mac officially released

As pre-announced in my two previous posts, DB2 for Mac OS X Leopard is finally available for download. It’s now official, DB2 on Mac is here. Reflections on DB2 on Mac Several people, including myself, would happily ditch their virtual machines and start introducing DB2 into their native Mac development stacks. But this milestone represents much more than the immediate implications would have us believe. A few...

Learn Merb

The most effective martial artists specialize in their discipline, but are not afraid to cross-train in others. Bruce Lee—arguably the most famous and influential martial artist of the past century—trained first in Tai Chi Chuan, then Gung Fu, and boxing, as well as learning western fencing. The insight taken from so many disciplines led him to create the Jeet Kune Do form of combat. Programmers are not...

DB2 on Mac to ship before Christmas

This is not an official announcement, but I must share the news with you. DB2 Express-C for Mac OS X Leopard will finally be shipping out (before Christmas), in all likelihood it could be as soon as early next week. You may recall how more than a year ago I blogged about how the work on porting DB2 to the Mac had started. It took admittedly longer than expected but DB2 on Mac is coming, and is absolutely free of...

Reflections on the Ruby shootout

Yesterday I published The Great Ruby Shootout and it quickly gathered a fair deal of attention. It was on the front page of Slashdot, Hacker News, Reddit, and so on. More than 15,000 people came by to read about the results of my comparison between Ruby implementations. Those numbers looked good but something didn’t add up. Ever since I clicked the “Publish” button, I had a very uneasy feeling...

The Great Ruby Shootout (December 2008)

The long awaited Ruby virtual machine shootout is here. In this report I’ve compared the performances of several Ruby implementations against a set of synthetic benchmarks. The implementations that I tested were Ruby 1.8 (aka MRI), Ruby 1.9 (aka Yarv), Ruby Enterprise Edition (aka REE), JRuby 1.1.6RC1, Rubinius, MagLev, MacRuby 0.3 and IronRuby. Disclaimer Just as with the previous shootout, before...

Merb, Rails Myths, Language Popularity and other Zenbits

Zenbits are posts which include a variety of interesting subjects that I’d like to talk about briefly, without writing a post for each of them. Merb: A few days ago Merb 1.0 was released. Congratulations to Ezra Zygmuntowicz on this important milestone, the Merb community and Engine Yard (who finances the project). Merb 1.0 wasn’t even out yet when some people had already started commenting on the...

And the winner is…

A few days ago I announced that I was going to give away a free ticket for the first Professional Ruby Conference, organized by Obie Fernandez and Addison-Wesley, to one of my readers. Each person who took the survey, received a discount code for the conference valued at $200. More excitingly, every eligible participant in the survey was added to a draw for a free ticket. Many replies came in, but of them only 30...

Take this survey and win a free ticket for the Professional Ruby Conference

Addison Wesley will hold their first Professional Ruby Conference in Boston, Massachusetts between November 17 and 20, 2008. This conference, for which Obie Fernandez is the Technical Chair, is highly educational and boasts some of the best speakers from the Ruby and Rails communities. The organizers were kind enough to invite me, offering me a complimentary pass for the Professional Ruby Conference. I won’t...

Benchmarking DB2 pureXML against 1 TB of XML data

Once upon a time there was a Ruby library called Hpricot. Well it’s still here in fact. This library is the de facto standard for parsing HTML in Ruby, and is often used to parse XML as well. Hpricot is normally considered to be quite fast, as far as Ruby libraries go. Yet Nokogiri recently garnered some buzz thanks to a microbenchmark that emphasized its speed over Hpricot’s, when it comes to parsing...

What Arc should learn from Ruby

There was a lot of buzz surrounding Arc before it was released. Then Paul Graham made an early version available to the public and most people weren’t too impressed. Paul is a charismatic figure and has his own following, so despite the uncertain welcome that the language received, Arc managed to attract a small community of curious developers. Then silence. For a few months, most people hardly heard anything...

Review of the first two Envycasts

The following quiz contains five fairly simple questions about ActiveRecord and Rails 2.2. Try to see if you can answer all of them. 1) What’s wrong with the following (technically valid) line of code? Guide.find(:all, :include => [:user, {:questions => [:user, {:answers => :user}]}], :conditions => "answers.user_id = 42") 2) Having specified :counter_cache => true...

Ruby on Rails at IOD 2008

IBM’s Information on Demand 2008 kicks off in a few days. If you intend on participating, don’t forget to enroll now. For those of you who’ll be attending the event in Las Vegas, I recommend that you schedule in time to check out the session “Putting DB2 on Rails”. This session will be presented by my manager, Leon Katsnelson and my colleague Bradley Steinfeld, and will outline the...

Free version of Ruby in Steel

Later today, SapphireSteel is going to release a free ‘personal’ version of their Ruby in Steel IDE (based on the Visual Studio Shell). This is great news for those of you who are used to Visual Studio and are now switching to Ruby/Rails, or simply for developers who opt to work on Windows (both categories of developers may also be interested in my forthcoming book). This has not been officially...

How companies should hire developers

A couple of weeks ago Obie Fernandez posted a job offer for his company, Hashrocket, on his blog. To me this ad is the perfect example of how startups, and well established companies too, should attract talented developers. Let’s analyze why this job ad is highly effective. Consider the intro: Here’s a short and sweet version of a listing I’m going to start posting on various job boards tomorrow....

Django turns 1.0

A couple of weeks ago Django 1.0 was finally released. In the software world version numbers can be rather arbitrary, but this announcement electrified the usually quiet community. Hiding behind the 1.0 label there are thousands of bug fixes, code refactoring of crucial components, compatibility with Jython 2.5, and the addition of impressive features such as GeoDjango which adds GIS capabilities to the...