Noel Rappin Writes Here

I wasn’t going to write this, because it’s not like the Internet has a dearth of people writing about Steve Jobs who never knew him or interacted with him in any way. I wrote it anyway. I’ve watched the first few minutes of the keynote introducing the iPhone several times. It amazes me – both as a seminal moment of technology and as a presentation. Jobs starts of by saying he’s been looking forward to this day for two-and-a-half years, and that he’s been fortunate to work on multiple “revolutionary” products in his career.

Okay, the blog has been very quiet for the last month or so. Please be polite and pretend you noticed. I’ve alluded online to a new book one or two places and now I think it’s far enough along that I can mention it in public without being too scared. Let’s do this Q&A style, call it an infrequently asked question list… Q: What’s the new book? A: Great question. The working title is Getting Things Done In JavaScript.

As you may have heard, Obtiva got bought by Groupon. I’ve been traveling a bunch, so this coming week is my first full week in the Groupon office post-transition. And, well, someday maybe I’ll write retrospectively about Obtiva, but today isn’t that day. I’ll probably write about what I’m going to be doing at Groupon, but today isn’t that day, either. Instead, I realized that month marks four years since I left Motorola and became a Rails consultant.

I was a nerdy kid. I suppose that isn’t much of a surprise, given how I turned out. But in those pre-computer days, I was nerdy about math and baseball. I was the kind of kid that kept a daily log of my batting statistics in the recess kickball games. So you can imagine my surprise and happiness when this image appeared in Sports Illustrated, in May 1981. I was ten:

I want to tell you about LoneStar RubyConf and how my session went and all that, but first I want to tell you this seemingly unrelated story. Once upon a time, my Senior undergraduate project was an educational software tool I built to teach fractions to elementary school students. (To give you the time frame here, it was written in Visual Basic 1 on Windows 3, and I had to ship my own desktop to the school to ensure that they’d have something I could run it on.

A few quick notes about Lion, mostly first impressions and things I haven’t necessarily seen a ton of coverage on. The install itself This is, I think, my third major OS upgrade since I started using OS X all the time. It’s by far the easiest install. The biggest problem was the time it took to download the installer. I also had a problem where the XCode installer finished but didn’t register itself as finished, such that it appeared to hang.

So I tend to keep an eye on interesting things in the Ruby self-published technical book space. This isn’t exactly recent, but I did want to mention and endorse Avdi Grimm’s Exceptional Ruby. This is exactly the kind of thing that should be happening in the self-publishing space. It’s a brief, thorough exploration of a very specific topic, in this case error and exception handling in Ruby. You may think you understand Ruby’s error mechanisms, but I’m pretty sure that unless you are actually Avdi, you will learn something both about the mechanics or Ruby’s exception handling and how best to robustly integrate error management into your code.

The problem with sitting on these daily link posts is that the links go out of date. Sigh. Here are some links. Twitter I found a couple of things about this InfoQ article about Twitter’s infrastructure odd. I was expecting it to be a bit more of a Rails hit-piece, frankly, so it was nice to see a quote like this one from Evan Weaver: I wouldn’t say that Rails has served as poorly in any way, it’s just that we outgrew it very quickly.

Back in January 2009, I did a bunch of interviews with prominent Rubyists about their test practices. The interviews vanished when I moved the site to WordPress, but I still get hits from a link to the interviews, and I thought it would be useful to get them all in one place. Remember, this was 2009, and I’m sure everybody’s habits have changed since then. Other than putting them all together in one post, I haven’t edited these at all.

So, as threatened on Twitter, I decided to overreact to Vim users by trying out BBEdit for my Rails development. Expect a write up soon, but the first pass is that it’s clearly a very powerful program, but it also clearly was developed in response to a set of needs that are not completely congruent with my needs. 1. Contains Me I’m very excited to mention that I’ll be doing a day-long training session at Lone Star Ruby Conf.