Robby on Rails

Earlier today, Vincent Foley was kind enough to hand over maitenance of the the ShortURL project on RubyForge to me. He first released it back in 2005, which I blogged about as RubyURL was the first shortening service that it supported (and is the default). Unfortunately, the release of RubyURL 2.0 broke backwards compatibility and Vincent wasn’t maintaining it anymore. So, earlier, I decided to patch this and got a new version released that now works with the current RubyURL site.

While working on the code, I decided to extend the compatible services to include moourl and urlTea.

These updates are available in ShortURL version 0.8.4.

Install the ShortURL gem

Installation is a snap… (like 99.7% of rubygems…)

  ~ > sudo gem install shorturl                                                                                                                                                                                                           Password:

  Successfully installed shorturl-0.8.4
  1 gem installed
  Installing ri documentation for shorturl-0.8.4...
  Installing RDoc documentation for shorturl-0.8.4.  

Using ShortURL

The ShortURL gem provides the ShortURL library, which you can use from any Ruby application.

Using the ShortURL library

  ~ > irb                                                                                                                                                                                                                           
  irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
  => true
  irb(main):002:0> require 'shorturl'
  => true
  irb(main):003:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com' )
  => "http://rubyurl.com/P9w" 

As you can see…it’s really straight forward.

Let’s try it with a few other services.

irb(main):004:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :moourl )
=> "http://moourl.com/fvoky" 
irb(main):005:0> ShortURL.shorten( 'http://www.istwitterdown.com', :tinyurl )
=> "http://tinyurl.com/2t3qmh" 

Using the shorturl command-line tool

Many people don’t know that ShortURL provides a command-line tool, which you can use after installing the gem.

  ~ > shorturl http://istwitterdown.com                                                                                                                                                                                               
  http://rubyurl.com/Lwk

If you’d like to see more services provided than the ones listed here, please submit feature requests and/or patches on the rubyforge project.

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

ShortURL Documentation

To see the latest documentation for the project, please visit:

• http://rubyforge.org/projects/shorturl/

My favorite part about this? My rbot plugin for RubyURL works again!

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Happy URL-shortening!

First of all, Happy New Year!

The other day I received an email from a friend where she asked me if I thought that having excellent math skills were important in a programmers career. I’ve heard this question asked before and while I thought that might have been the case when I was a lot younger (when I had zero plans to go into the IT world)... I’ve not seen this to be true. My response to her was that it really depended on the types of programming work that one might want to go into. There are definitely programming jobs that require extremely advanced mathematical skills, but I’d guess that many, if not most, don’t really have that sort of prerequisite.

So, as I was saying. I think it really depends. It depends on what sort of programming you’re interested in pursuing. In general, when we’re looking to hire someone at Planet Argon, we’re looking for people with good research and problem solving skills. Programming languages are tools to help solve problems and build things. So, while math skills are useful, they aren’t likely going to make or break a developer.

Like any career, it should be something that you’re passionate about.

I’m curious. As programmers… how would you respond to the following question?

“Should an advanced knowledge of mathematics be a prerequisite in pursuing a career in programming?”

I can only answer the question from my own perspective and would like to share some others. Thanks!

Last week, I gave a live presentation to ~250 people, which was basically me walking through the process of using Ruby on Rails to talk to a legacy database¹. For my example, I used the Dell DVD database... the PostgreSQL version. You can review some comments about my presentation by reviewing this entry on the blog of Ryan Davis. I wrapped quite a bit of the database in a few minutes and then showed what another 45 minutes of work could do with Rails. I’ll tarball that code and post it online soon.

Alex Bunardzic found it practical. I’ll take that as a compliment. ;-)

Earlier, I noticed this blog entry by Chris… where he said, “PostgreSQL also seems to be growing more briskly among the database category, while MySQL declines modestly. I guess that’s good news for Robby.” What exactly made me happy? This bullet made by Tim O’Reilly on Radar in his post, State of the Computer Book Market, Part 2.

“A surprise to many may be the strong growth of PostgreSQL, up 84% over a year ago. We’ve also been hearing some signs of growth in the Postgres market from our “alpha geek” radar, with reasons given including better support for geo data, and better handling of very large data sets. New companies like Greenplum and EnterpriseDB have also brought a little focus to this market. We’re updating our PostgreSQL book, and watching this market closely.”

That’s awesome! Go PostgreSQL!

Then to my surprise, I was contacted by CRN (again) to get my thoughts on MySQL’s awesome storage-engine plugin system... which showed up a few hours later in this article. The writer of that article managed to goof my last name (Robby Hill?)... and hopefully that gets resolved soon. ;-)

As I said at Canada on Rails in front of 250 people, “I find databases… sexy.”

(free desktop wallpaper!)

Why Rails? Why PostgreSQL?

Rails.. that’s a no-brainer.

PostgreSQL? Well.. they have compatible licenses… no dual-license smell when your trying to sell your application as a complete solution… and as Rails is database agnostic... there is no reason not to give PostgreSQL a try.

Who uses PostgreSQL on Rails?

• CDBaby
• Shopify
• PLANET ARGON (on almost every project we work on…)
• you…?

If your using PostgreSQL on Rails… email me... I’d love to hear and share your story on my O’Reilly blog, like I did with Derek Sivers and Jeremy Kemper of CDBaby a few months ago, which you can read here.

again… I find databases sexy...

If your a PLANET ARGON hosting customer… you can follow these instructions to install PostgreSQL on your PLANET ARGON hosting account.

¹ According to the Rails convention (and by me)... any database created pre-Rails or doesn’t follow the conventions is considered legacy. ;-)

Why is everybody interested in using PostgreSQL? We all know that it’s a pain to install, a pain to maintain, and Rails only works with MySQL. So, why do we bother?

This article titled, Five reasons why you should never use PostgreSQL. Ever. clears up these questions.

My favorite is… “Reason #5: You (don’t) get what you (don’t) pay for”

Imagine if we said the same thing about Ruby on Rails?

Similar Post(s): The bitter-sweet taste of agnostic database schemas, Localization with Rails and PostgreSQL, part 1

I was skimming over a few RSS feeds ( blogs.thoughtworks.com ) this morning and came across an entry by Griffin Caprio. He shared his thought on the new book by Chris Pine, Learn to Program and says the following:

”...You wouldn’t see these types of books in other professions like medical, engineering, or accounting because there are boards that prevent just any old person from practicing in those fields.

And I understand everyone’s love of Ruby, but come on people. It’s just a language.”

Actually, yes. Learning to program, build, create, test, problem solve, etc… are all things that we should encourage.

Let’s do a quick search on amazon for the following, Learn to Program. I’m pretty sure these books have been common place for the past 20+ years… so, what’s the big deal?

It’s like telling a kid not to build a bird house until he gets a contractors license and a permit.

...or telling someone to not pick up a guitar until they had proper lessons.

...or maybe you shouldn’t be running a business without graduating from college.

I could go on and on.

Oh… and by the way…

puts "Hello World"

is much sexier than

public static void main(String[] args) {
  System.out.println ("Hello World"); 
}

On that note… check out Learn to Program by Chris Pine.

UPDATE Griffin has followed up to my blog entry with another. He goes on to say, “The kid who builds the bird house above would never be hired to build an actual house. Not true in Software Development.” (read more)

I think this problem raises a completely different problem. Why are unqualified people being hired to do things that they aren’t qualified for? Do we blame the people learning to program or do we look at who hires these people in the first place? I’m still confused by his argument.

That kid may not get hired to build a house, but he may get interested in that as a career and continue to pursue it… if someone hires him to build the whole house, then the person hiring should be held accountable do some degree as well. Check references! ;-)

On the flip-side… is this an argument to only take people who have been approved by some board (...MCSE?) seriously when hiring developers?

Update #2

Griffin has outlined his points in more detail in this third entry.

DHH wrote that Tim O’Reilly wrote on O’Reilly Radar, Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python.

While I was looking at the data, though, I noticed something perhaps more newsworthy: in the same period, Ruby book sales surpassed Python book sales for the first time. Python is up 20% vs. the same period last year, but Ruby is up 1552%! (Perl is down 3%.)

...awesome!