Posts filed under 'Ruby (& Rails)'
Well, SHiFT isn’t happening this year… and yeah, believe me no one’s more sad about it than myself, well may two other crazy guys! But we couldn’t stand still so we’re helping SAPO in an astonishing event:
and trust me, we’re all aiming high, as high as we’re allowed to get all the Portuguese developers an amazing event, party and mash-ups contest!
The event is obviously inspired in the Yahoo Hackday which totally contagious us back in May in London when some of us managed to attend it. Since not all Portuguese can afford traveling as far, SAPO decided to recreate it!
We’re trying to include everyone that wishes to go, but since the seats are limited, I urge everyone who praises for his/her geekiness without shame to register at:
Time as come for all of you geeks in the closet to come out, so I really hope we can all meet up in November in Lisbon!! 
September 21st, 2007
UPDATE: I’ve also uploaded some pics to flickr, and the presentations are already being put online at the railsconf homepage.
As promissed I’ve been writing down a lot of notes (on paper) from the conference itself, which I’ll put online later! For now, you could check some of my non-edited notes from the presentations I’ve attend so far:
September 18th, 2007
UPDATE: check my (unreviewed) notes here.
If all goes as planned, from Monday to Thursday I’ll be at the RailsConf Europe in Berlin.
For people wondering what I’m talking about:
Ruby On Rails is a programming framework for building database-driven websites which is becoming increasingly popular among programmers, mainly because its easy and yields results quickly, requires minimal configuration and project start-up overhead. Rails is written in Ruby, an object-oriented scripting language with roots in Perl, Lisp, and Smalltalk (2 of my personal favorites out of 3!).
So if you’re around Berlin during these days, please send me a mail and will meet up!
For all the friends and Rubists who couldn’t make it to Berlin, I’ll going to cover it here on the blog, (in Portuguese primarily) as much as I can!
September 15th, 2007
After almost ten years using Perl as my programming language of choice, I confess that I really surprised with Ruby and in particular with the MVC framework Ruby On Rails. I’ve been learning Ruby and Ruby On Rails as side project of mine, but the more I read about it, the more I find to develop without it!
When developing any application, but especially when doing web development, we all take advantages when we get a working prototype online, that people can actually test and interact with. Could be something that I never really mastered, but the truth was that I’ve seem to be doing a lot of repetitive work across different projects to achieve the same goals, or particular features.
Ruby is a dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. It has an elegant syntax that is natural to read and easy to write. Created by Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, in Ruby he blended parts of his favorite languages like Perl, Smalltalk, Eiffel, Ada, and Lisp to form a new language that balanced functional programming with imperative programming.
Rails is a full-stack framework for developing database-backed web applications according to the Model-View-Control pattern, development by David Heinemeier Hansson
I’m not by far, as proficient programming in Ruby as I am with Perl, and for that I’ll keep myself well aware of Perl for the coming times, but I’ve started some web projects using Ruby On Rails and I certainlly see myself using it more and more in the future as my web development language (Ruby) / framework (rails) of choice. Perl still rocks! And on the command line, besides unbeatable, it’s still much more intuitive for me to program in Perl, than it is and probably will ever be using Ruby.
Some of the books, I own about Ruby and Ruby On Rails, some of them in electronic format, but most of them in paperback versions too:
I’ll be posting more about problems and examples along my learning process, but if anyone has any curiosity about it or even doubts, feel free to drop me an email about Ruby or Rails, and as soon as I can, I’ll get back to you. 
March 2nd, 2007
Talking about impressive videos, having met David and Jason on Copenhagen in 2005, during their “Building of Basecamp” workshop, I can assure you, these guys are as much mac addicted as I am, so it comes with no surprise this video at Apple site, a mix of interview with a first person explanation why Macs helped their business, in these case the products developed by 37signals.
Its nice to see some well made software get its share of support from a company like Apple, a company that always search for simpler ways of working too it kind of fits in, doesn’t it?
October 23rd, 2006
Well, I must confess it was the most refreshing event in Portugal for the last couple of years, and simply for that, thank you Fred and all the WeBreakStuff team for organizing everything!
It was an impressive networking event, we talk about so many different things that would be impossible to write about them all here, so I just leave here a short list about the main projects and ideas we talked about during this barcamp:
It’s impressive what happens when people just sit down, take some time off, talk, share ideas, ask for advices, freely advice and criticize other projects/ideas! Regardless of what most of the portuguese tend to think, ideas just work like that, they blossom and tend to give way to a bunch more ideas, which I think that was the best achievement of this BarCamp.
I’ve met quite a bunch of new people, interesting people with interesting ideas! The main idea was summarized by Fred during his presentation: “we shouldn’t have fear of failing“. To fail is human, and failling is the best learning process we have. By failling we’re not just learning what lead us to failure we’re also learning a whole on how to procede on a next opportunity.
Having this in mind, it’s more than time that we here in Portugal drop the (easy) critic position and just take a part on this web 2.0 idea. Which as many people tend to think has nothing to do with the rounded corners or the gradients as we all laugh about! The “new” web is about the birth of new projects, new ideas, remix of “old” ideas and procedures, as Thomas put it during Reboot, we’re talking about a “New Renaissanse” here…
For all the BarCamp participants, one thing is for sure, not only we’re going to repeat it, you’re sure going to hear a whole lot more from all of us there!
September 4th, 2006