Robby on Rails

Over on the Planet Argon blog, you can read an enlightening interview with two of our Jr. Ruby on Rails developers. Both of them made a career change in their 30s and went through a coding academy here in Portland, Oregon.

Check it out…

We’re all excited about the prospect of a new code editor (Atom Editor). We all love what Github has produced so far and our expectations for anything new are going to be quite high.

Do we know exactly what it’ll be yet? Not quite. We have some hints… but until it’s released… we’ll continue to speculate.

While I am not one to make predictions—I do have a few theories about what Atom will not do for us. (if you’re looking for a new business idea… feel free to snag any of these)

1. Atom Editor will not make it easier to code while in the shower. While I would love to take advantage of putting my thoughts to code while letting my conditioner do it’s thing… I don’t believe they’re trying to solve this problem (yet).

2. Atom Editor is not going to make it difficult for me to produce shitty code. To date, nearly every code editor on the market is focused on making it easier to produce code…. good AND/OR bad. Where is the editor that tells us to quit while we’re head. “Are you serious, Robby? Have you seen what you’ve been writing today? Just stop. Go outside. Take a break and try again tomorrow.”

3. Atom Editor will not bring synergy to developers.

4. Atom Editor will not change the music playing to compliment the coding problem that I’m faced with. If my tests aren’t passing… I wish my music would keep me calm and focused. This is not a time to start playing WHAM! (…or maybe it is)

5. Atom Editor will not bring about peace in the Emacs vs Vim wars. We are going to have to let them sort a peace deal on their own.

6. Atom Editor will not have integrated CVS or Subversion support when it is released.

7. Atom Editor will not promise the world to you like Visual Studio.NET did back in 2002. I remember their demo videos and it seemed like the development world was about to change! I never would have guessed that come 2005, I’d be in love with something as simple and fancy-feature-less as TextMate.

8. Atom Editor will not just be a clone of Sublime Editor. Github has too clever a team for that objective.

What are you confident that Atom Editor will not be?

Update

8 for 8!

funny how Twitter warned me that a bunch of my friends at GitHub are all a sudden interested in https://t.co/cb52btuPZe

— Matt Aimonetti (@mattetti) February 26, 2014

...which leads us to

Initial sources suggest that will be one of the biggest app releases of the year.

It’ll be loved by many. Hated by some.

For more details… visit Atom.io or Atom Beta

Dear @ohmyzsh users… we are ready! ;-)

Updates

As we learn more… I will try to keep this updated. Here are a few “screenshots” people have posted on twitter.

Some animated gifs:

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Stay tuned…

SOON.

— Tom Preston-Werner (@mojombo) February 26, 2014

You might consider following @AtomEditor on twitter.

Follow @AtomEditor

It’s been an odd day. The sort of day where you really don’t know what to say. The only thing you can manage to get out is, “Sigh. I’m going to miss him.”

Jim Weirich was building interesting stuff with Ruby several years before I was introduced to it. Tools that most of us have taken for granted. Tools that were just there.

Before Jim came along… they didn’t exist.

Back in the early Ruby on Rails explosion era (circa 2004-2006), it was much easier to get to know the great Rubyists. I remember finally getting a chance to meet Jim (and _why) at FOSCON here in Portland, which still goes down as one of the best “conferences” I have ever attended.

(I think we all knew something special was happening.)

Jim spoke at a ton of conferences. At any conference that I seemed to get invited to speak at… Jim seemed to always be on the speaker list too. We’d end up meeting up on the conference circuit a several times over the coming years. It was always a delight to catchup.

Photo by Obie from Rails Underground 2009

I believe the last one was in 2009 at Rails Underground in London. I remember walking in one of the rooms and spotting Jim. There he was… waiting patiently for his time slot… sitting by the wall in another horribly uncomfortable conference chair… hacking away on his laptop as if he was on a mission to save the human race. In reality, he was probably toying around with some new idea.

As I walked towards him… my red hair must have caught the corner of his eyes… because he looked up and with the warmest of smiles and kindest of voices said, “Robby!”

It’s people like Jim that helped me feel like I had something valuable to contribute to the community. The mere fact that he knew who I was, that he commented on my silly blog posts, referred potential customers to me, showed up for and complimented me on my talks, asked ME for advice on IRC, wished me a happy birthday on Facebook, responded to my lazy tweets… made me feel like I was welcome to (and part of) the party.

A party that started a number of years before I showed up.

Let us raise our glasses high and thank our host for the pleasure of being amidst his most generous company.

Thank you, Jim, for helping me learn more about myself. I only wish I had gotten to know you more.

Adieu l’ami.