notes from GoRuCo2008
I’m seeing a lot of interesting stuff at GoRuCo and I was going to start taking notes in textmate but I decided to just put them here on my blog instead.
Chris Wanstrath, parse tree
- Sake, rake tasks that you can use between different projects.
- Cheat — command line interface for looking up documentation. Like ‘man’ for ruby and rails methods.
- Ruby2Ruby (I can’t find the official homepage, that’s a placeholder). Looks very cool, but I am not 100% sure what it does other than self-document (?) your ruby code with ruby code. I have to play with this to figure it out.
- RingServer, RingyDingy — a way to do mapreduce type stuff using drb in ruby. I wonder if we can use this for tasks at outside.in
Ryan Davis, Hurting Code For Fun and Profit
- Code-writing ability increases non-linearly when you become a Ruby sadist/asceticist
- coined a new term: menturbating/mentorbating
- “Introspection-driven development”
- self-improvement: read 1 nerd book/month (12x the industry avg). c2.com , read 10-20ish smart blogs
- ignorance is not bliss. NYT article by Erica Goode
- wtf, coding horror and other idiot forums, trim the blogs in your newsreader, focus
- important/not-important, urgent/not-urgent. these form a quadrant. push towards important. the not-important and not-urgent stuff are useful at times, too, for fighting burnout. via 7 habits of highly effective people by covey. “do you want to be right, or do you want to be effective?”
- study something non-coding-oriented. push yourself. write more code, lots of it. junk code. write stuff to figure something out. quantity can be greater than quality (sometimes)
- “The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork
is simply to teach you how to make the small fraction
of your artwork that soars.” from: “Art & Fear” - Don’t be a sheep. challenge the status quo. Feel. Let your emotions flow. Have an opinion (but dont be an asshole).
- zentest, flog (complexity reported based on ABC metric, correlates to testing complexity. the scores are important relative to each other, not absolutely) & heckle — (love of good dev tools)
- vlad and image_science — (hate of complex code)
- use feedback. ask for it. listen to it. feed the feedback back. constantly refine.
- find your balance. between 0-100% action and 0-100% thought is your sweet spot. find that balance an dyou’ll be most of effective.
- ryan hates inject — why? (see the mailing list)
- heckle: runs your tests and mutates your implementations to verify that your tests are good. if youre mutated tests still pass after mutation, you missed an edge case
- enjoy hurting bad code and you’ll have less of it over time. eschew complexity.
Paul Dix, Collective Intelligence
- Slides are up at paul’s blog
- explicit versus implicit data. implicit happens as a result of other actions. scrobbling is an example. explicit makes you make choices (give ratings/grades/stars to things, etc.)
- types of recommendations — content-, user- and item-based. content is like other content, users are like other users, items are like other items.
- basic strategy: map data to a euclidean spaces, calculate similarity using a metric, and use similarities to recommend. represent the data as vectors.
- (I discovered confreaks just now. cool. I think goruco vids will be up there later.
Ezra Zygmuntowicz, Merb
- Merb looks really cool. I got tired of taking notes here so I just sat back and watched his talk. Next personal project I do is going to be in Merb.
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