Gareth AdamsScotRubyConf: Geeks On Tour
Four Englishmen and some Americans walk into a Scottish bar… it’s not the start of a horribly convoluted joke (although if you like: punchlines on a postcard) but part of Kyanmedia’s recent journey up to Edinburgh for the Scottish Ruby Conference.
Ruby on Rails, and the Ruby language that it’s built on, are big enough technologies now that conferences are held worldwide. For Rails there are events from the iconic RailsConf in America to the European RubyAndRails, whereas Ruby developers can go to Japan’s RubyKaigi or even Magic Ruby in Disneyland, Florida.
ScotRubyConf was a conference a bit closer to home, and happily four of us got the chance to visit one of britain’s most beautiful cities, and hopefully come away with some beautiful code ideas.
Better sanity checking in Rails
When you’re building a web application, Rails does a load of the heavy lifting for you. Many of the core philosophies of Rails are aimed around only implementing functionality in the place it makes sense.
This turns out to be a great idea for readability, and with practice – and thoughtful naming – it isn’t too difficult to keep your code clean enough that you can see at a glance what it does. You can get to the point where your controller code just gives a high-level overview of what the code does, and leaves all the details to the models and other modules.
Lots of the tools in a Rails developer’s toolbox are commonly known, but there are a couple of useful ones that are newer and haven’t been picked up on as much.
Hml roubles for I.T. gian Cisco
It seems even the big boys of I.T. don’t have their sites completely foolproofed.
For some reason (either malice or incompetence) the Cisco homepage today had all of its lowercase ’t’s removed from the source (although strangely, the uppercase ’T’s stayed behind)
While this could be a worry for Kyan’s resident tea-lovers, obviously a bigger problem for Cisco is finding out why their “syleshees” aren’t loading.
Hopefully they’re using some kind of source control so they can see who was responsible for that change to the most important page on the site
Vanity and Volcanoes
I guess every geek goes through a phase of wondering just how geeky they are.
I recently got an email from my new landlord, whose surname is Maltby. They’d cleverly managed to buy ltby.com, which meant their email addresses were all in the form …m@ltby .com
This got me thinking about other kinds of domain hack, and to cut a long story short I now own the rethada.ms domain
It means I now have the very concise email address “g@rethada.ms” and eventually a site at http://ga.rethada.ms
All of this is made possible thanks to the sparsely populated, volcanic-ash-covered Caribbean island Montserrat. Since their population of just over 4000 don’t make use of the territory’s TLD they offer it out to non-residents without restriction, much like other vanity TLDs like .tv (Tuvalu) and .tk (Tokelau)
Needless to say, I’m pretty confident about my geekuality now.
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Tags: website, web_application