Imagine yourself and a posse of like-minded Ruby hackers on a country retreat with zero internet for a weekend of fun. You’ll laugh, hack, learn, cry (well, you probably won’t cry… but you know… it felt poetic) and most likely play a crap-load of guitar hero. [manifesto]
In chronological order, the first RailsCamps in Australia were in the states: New South Wales, Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia.
This time, between May 15th and 18th, it’s in Queensland. God’s Country. The Sunshine State. Home of Steve Irwin (deceased), Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen (deceased), Greg Norman (expat), Keith Urban (expat), and Kristy Hinze (marrying ex-Silicon Graphics/ex-Netscape billionaire Jim Clark; expat). So its a pretty famous and popular place to come from.
Book your tickets now for RailsCamp #5.
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There’s been some malarky very recently about “how do I find a lot of mature, awesome Rails developers?” (rails-business + #rmm)
I think this is the wrong question. And the wrong question will lead to the wrong answer.
What is the right question?
The right question can lead to a right answer. The right question you should ask yourself every day:
“Where do I find a lot of mature, awesome Rails developers?”
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I’m getting close to releasing a new Cocoa application, CommitChat, a sexy interface to having conversations for each commit in each watched project in GitHub. It was time to start thinking about packaging and distribution.
The result is a new project for all Cocoa developers, called ChocTop, and a 30-minute tutorial screencast on how to use it. ChocTop is to Cocoa apps what Hoe is to RubyGems; except prettier.
Packaging Cocoa apps
You can package and release Cocoa apps in a number of ways. Each app is actually a folder, so they need some packaging. Zip files are easy and the bonus is they auto-open when people download them. But for me, without a doubt, is the DMG packaging with a custom background image and the embedded symlink to the Applications folder, like the one for CommitChat below.
I’ve always loved it. It made me as a user feel that this piece of software was special. A custom DMG is like a piece of magic.
Now like most magic, its really only magical when you don’t know how its done.
But there in lies a problem. You want to release your own Cocoa software with a beautiful custom DMG but you don’t want to know how to do it. You want the magic, even as a developer, but that means you can’t know how to do it.
And trust me you do NOT want to know how to do it. Ever.
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Its almost Christmas time and that means presents.
It also means that sometime between today and December 25th you need to go out and buy other people some presents because you haven’t done it yet.
But there’s someone else special in your life that deserves an Xmas gift this year. That special someone is your open source projects.
You might think, “But, Dr Nic, what do I get for the open source project that already has everything? What gift would my open source projects possible appreciate?”
Its true – this year has been a boon for open source. You probably migrated your projects from SVN to Git this year. Specifically, you probably clicked the “create a new one” link on your GitHub home page a lot this year: either to migrate your old projects to github or start new ones. Lots of new ones.
And now that your code is on github, your README file is rendered beautifully on the home page, so you were more inclined to rename it to README.markdown or README.textile and thusforthly fill it full of education information about your projects.
More people would then instantaneously figure out what the f@#$ your project actually does, thus more people used it, thus more people wrote patches or forked your code and sent Pull Requests.
All round, in 2008, I bet your open source projects had a sweet year.
Nonetheless, it is Christmas time and you should now get them a present. Something they wouldn’t get for themselves. Something you wouldn’t have done for them except for the free loving spirit of Christmas.
The Gift for all Open Source projects
A website.
Oh sure, github renders your README.markdown file. Yeah, yeah, github gives you a wiki for your project. Sure, sure, Google Groups let you communicate with your co-developers and users. Certainly, you don’t need a website for your project.
That’s why its a Christmas gift. You’re going to do it because you care.
Websites sell your project. READMEs and Wikis educate. The project website will sell it and make people want to use your stuff.
A website could have a blog with an RSS/atom feed. Then you could post updates about your project. People could subscribe and also leave comments. Oh the novelty.
And if it only took 5 minutes to get all this setup – the website code, the blog engine, the RSS feed, the comments, and published to its own hosted server – then that would just be oh so sweet.
So we’re going to do some craft for our Xmas present. A little DIY project, if you will. You’ll need a few things that you’ll find around your house, a command-line interface, and a beer or perhaps some port or sherry. Christmas cake is good too.
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Bugger.
I’m a Ruby monogamist. I use the Ruby that comes with Leopard (ruby 1.8.6 (2008-03-03 patchlevel 114) [universal-darwin9.0]). Oh sure I’ve cheated on my Ruby a couple of times. It was just sex, I didn’t fall in love, I promise.
My machine has had various versions of jRuby, Rubinius and MacRuby installed at various times, but I don’t think it’s ever had two working copies of Ruby MRI (Matz Ruby Implementation) at a time.
Ok, that’s a lie. On Christmas Day 2007, Matz released Ruby 1.9. Yes I was a deviant. I installed it. But I didn’t inhale. ruby19 sat on my filesystem outside the $PATH. It was a trophy not a tool.
My Ruby monogamy was working out perfectly for me, whilst I collected futurist and novelty Ruby implementations as a passive hobby, until yesterday when I saw the above tweet.
That’s a bit of a bugger. I mean, why was he playing with Ruby 1.9.1 anyway?
Or perhaps having multiple version of Ruby on one computer isn’t some illicit activity. Everyone else is doing it, Your Honour.
I still didn’t care for having multiple ruby versions lying around in my path; but I had to fix rubigen. I just wanted a way to fix bugs against ruby 1.9+ and move on with my life. I didn’t want to have to do any manual work in order to set this up. Surely someone else has solved this problem already?
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