RubyGeek

I did flash about 9-10 yrs ago. But I haven’t used it since, so when I saw Flash Camp 2010 was being held in downtown Chicago, I thought why not! I like to have at least a passing knowledge of all web tech and I didn’t know what Flex was all about. It was $20 and included lunch and beer at 4pm! It was very interesting, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing more about Flex. While watching the presentations, I was like, whoa… this seems like it does the same thing as GWT. Except, there is documentation!

James Ward, from Adobe gave the keynote. He went through the top 10 things he likes about Flex. That was really interesting. He showed how a pdf had an embedded swf that was a report that loaded live data. I asked a question, “Will other readers like Foxit be able to do this?” he said it was part of the PDF standard, so its up to other readers to implement it. But it is possible. He said they are working on a flash plugin for Android. I went up and asked him later in the day “why did it take so long? android has been out 2+ years?” He said they weren’t sure about the hardware and what it would support, and they had to do alot of rewriting to make the binary small enough. Ok so I guess it was a lets wait and see what will happen then we will implement flash. IMHO i still think they are missing the wagon… but what do I know, I’m just a coder!

Jeff Tapper talked about Flex 4 for Flex 3 developers. I didn’t know Flex at all but I still was fascinated by this talk. Kept thinking to the days of pain with GWT… i quick did a search on amazon for flex books..and there is alot.. so I was like, ok I am going to check this out. GWT is often frustrating because of the lack of documentation. Some books were written by Jeff!

Kevin Schmidt talked about accessing remote data in flex. During this talk i looked up flex builder and installed it. He accessed data in three ways so that was interesting.

Ben Schmidke talked about keeping your data grid healthy. He talked about how the datagrid is rendered and how you can optimize it for speed. I think he also showed an optimizer.

Adam Flater talked about Building RIAs with Style. He talked about styling your flex apps with some kinda of css-like syntax. Its not css exactly but looks similar.

Michael Labriola talked about Flex 4 Component Development. He explained why composition is better than inheritance. He showed how to make a circle layout. Custom layouts! ..this was really cool. I am anxious to learn more about Flex.

All in all, it was a good use of time and I won a book! Foundation ActionScript 3.0 for Flash and Flex. Be sure and watch as I do some poking around with flex and see if really I can do the same things as I might use with GWT.

In the past few weeks I’ve been doing alot of Git and alot more collaboration with people on projects! So i wanted to point out some of the things i’ve learned and some handy tips I picked up.

I was aimee remotely and she showed me how to “stage” a commit. Which is a way to indicate “HEY this is going to be commited when you do git commit!” I used to always do commit -a which adds all the files not currently in the staging. I used perforce for awhile and learned how nice it was to have a “change list” and how you can commit only certain files at a time. Git seems like you can only have one “change list” at a time but that is fine in most cases.

git add -p

It will go through each changed file and ask if you want to stage this hunk. We were able to see what files we had changed as it showed a diff. You can confirm or deny chunk by chunk. today I like to run it to make sure I didn’t accidentally change a file. I have a habit of leaving a file open, walking away and coming back and adjusting the spacing. Probably not something I need to in a commit.

git status

This is really cool command, not only does it show you what is in staging it tells you what to do with the other files to either add/remove etc to get the commit in the shape you want. After working with git more, i went back and re-watched the peepcode screencast on git. I understand it better now!

After we committed, we realized we made a mistake in log message, so we did

git commit –amend

It will amend the last message in your git repo. I recently tried this with one of my commits, but I had already pushed to origin. I was kind of confused, so I asked aimee, she said

no If you have already pushed, you can git push –force to update, but be careful because it destroys references, so if there’s a chance someone else may have pulled the commit in the meantime you won’t want to go pulling the rug from under their feet, y’know!

Ahh, makes sense aimee!!

Another sticky point for me was — what is inverse of git add? git rm?I keep a git repo of code I am working on as I to learn stuff, practice etc. Most if it is probably not really worth browsing, but i like to point my friends there when I talk about what I am doing. I wanted to clean up some stuff that I don’t want to keep and mistakenly thought if I git rm it would remove it from the staging. Nope, it removes it! Well, to revert a file back to what you use this:

git checkout — file.txt

more on this Why is “git rm” not the inverse of “git add”?

Anyways, a few tidbits of information I’ve learned recently, hope this can help you git better at git

sources I found helpful

• Git FAQ
• Git Community Book
• Pro Git, book by APress, content free online

Seems like Pair Programming is “all the rage” lately in my circles. I haven’t exactly done it before but after hearing about the success and rapid knowledge growth amongst those that pair program…I was almost dying to try it! Especially after i saw David Chelimsky and Corey Haines at WindyCityRails in Sept 2009. I saw them pair and do BDD with Rspec/Cucumber and it was so fascinating, It was like I was watching a ballet as they hopped from RSpec to Cucumber and back and forth. I was like, wow…I wish I was that good! I would have paid good money for a recording of that so I could watch it again and again! I see Corey Haines traveling around pairing with people too. Some people get together and play cards, but Corey gets together to code!

So ok, I like code, I like people, I want to try it! I live a little south of Chicago so its a long commute and it seemed everyone was so busy to pair in person when I asked. I asked on Devchix mailing list for suggestions on how to do pairing online. I had found a few, and the group had some good suggestions. I even had a volunteer to try it with me! This week aimee and I set a few hours aside to try it and see if we could do it!

This article was also sort of “paired” as it was written from my perspective with input and suggestions from aimee!

We asked on Devchix mailing list for suggestions on how to do pairing online. I had found a few, and the group had some good suggestions. I even had a volunteer to try it with me! This week aimee and I set a few hours aside to try it and see if we could do it!

After introductions on Skype we set about getting a shared environment in which to code together. Ideally, we wanted some kind of desktop sharing so we could run tests, console and editor.

We had heard of a few tools and got suggestions from the devchix list:

IChat desktop sharing - we couldn’t get this to work, we did different things and it would appear to connect but then it failed. I tried to mess with settings for Sharing on mac, but nothing doing.

Rio seems to be a library to make collaborative apps, not to use in a pair programming environment.

BeSpin was hard to use.. we couldn’t figure out exactly how to use it. It almost seemed to offer to import the git repository we were working on, but then it said it only supports Subversion and Mercurial, not git.

SubEthaEdit worked but we would have to open each file individually and share each file… unless I was missing something. This would be fine for collaborating on a single file but then we could not share the test runs, terminal commands or view the browser together.

Etherpad - we didn’t end up trying this but I have used it before to debug some code or try out ideas with a friend. They recently got bought by Google, so it would be interesting to see what they do with it. This would suffer the same limitations as SubEthaEdit in that it’s just a text editor.

GoToMeeting (which is $40-50/month) its a little steep for the open source work I want to do. But people say it works really well.

VNC and Unix Screen - aimee had used this successfully before but since we weren’t on the same network, just our laptops at home, we weren’t sure it how we could make it work easily.

Then we came to TeamViewer which worked brilliantly! We shared desktop and I could type in aimee’s console window, see the tests running and type in textmate. Even with aimee on her Dvorak keyboard and I on Qwerty! I could type fine but couldn’t copy/paste with keyboard shortcuts so I used the mouse to copy/paste and it worked fine.

All in all, it was an awesome experience and I picked up on a few tidbits of knowledge from aimee on git, and rake! I had some bits of code from another project i was able to quickly copy/paste and get us rolling. We had a few discussions about coding style as we went.

Since aimee was more familiar with the codebase, she mainly wrote the behavioral specs and I wrote the code to satisfy them. We plan to switch around next time, when we pair on a different project that I’ve been developing for a while.

Its been a crazy December through January and I haven’t written much!

I’m glad the GWT posts helped some of you from the comments. I spent some time on figuring them out from the limited docs on google’s GWT site, mostly I think it helps to have complete examples since they dont make it real clear what file each snippit of code goes in. I’m glad the pain I went through to figure them out help some of you A few of you had problems but i haven’t gotten around to seeing what is wrong. I was using the trunk version of GWT, so if you are using 2.0 then you might have some differences.

I’ve been diving my head back into rails after spending a spell in perl/mason and GWT in some projects for work. I think other languages are neat but I really love ruby. So I’ve been re-watching some of my episodes of PeepCode.com and RailsCasts.com those guys are awesome. I love this stuff. Why else would I be spending my Saturday night with Ruby vs watching a movie or playing a game!

I’ve also been playing with android a bit, its pretty fun to see my app on a phone! Working on a TODO List app, which seems almost like “hello world” but it has a twist… more later when i have something to show.

Been working learning jQuery. I had seen it before, but saw class names mixed with programming and having a ugghhhh feeling. But.. I decided to give it a shot and dang! I would have given my right arm to have this 5 years ago when i was experimenting with ajax (though it wasn’t called that…) with setting the src of a script tag with a php url to load and save data. Anyways, its cool and neat. I think the name is horrible since you aren’t really quering anything… IMHO Maybe if I can think of a better one I can suggest it, but seems like it is here to stay since there are stay since there are 4 books already about it!

To help with reviewing ruby I have been working through Ruby Koans. Hats off to EdgeCase. I have already written them and thanked them! This goes along with my post How To Get Better At Programming where I wrote about how i was working at getting better at programming. It all comes down to practice! … I think when I finish the rubykoans exercises, i will revert and start going through them again. Almost like doing pushups every day (I push up to get more coffee at least 3x a day!).

Git … I did my first pull request on github, very cool how that works.

Have some ideas for some more substantial posts… coming soon

I’ve have been pondering in the past 6 months - How do I get better at programing? What is the best way? do I need more books? At my current company, we whole heartedly engage in peer reviews, nothing gets checked in the repository without at least one person going over it. In that process, i’ve learned more about coding then I could from 10 books. I used to be a book fiend. I had about 10 books on every subject. Did I learn? yeah, some! But I think I’ve learned more from doing and practice. Practice, practice, practice! When the Chicago Ruby User Group offered this book in exchange for a review, I jumped at the chance.

“Refactoring in Ruby” written by William C. Wake and Kevin Rutherford.
Published by Addison-Wesley

“Refactoring in Ruby” is more like a “workbook” then a “how to write awesome code” book. If you download the code from github http://github.com/kevinrutherford/rrwb-code you have tests already written for the exercises.

The book is arranged in three parts, The Art of Refactoring, Code Smells, and Programs to Refactor.

There are explanations of “code smells” which are one characteristic of code that could be improved. Some of them are long parameter lists, unnecessarily complex, global variable, feature envy sections, etc. One thing I find interesting is the “How did it get this way?” section. It gives some insight into the thought process and reasoning behind the smell. I think this is good, as programmers our ego may be rather miffed to hear “This code stinks” but with some reasoning, it makes the pain less and I think firms up in our minds when this happens again, to do it this other way. I always want to know why when someone says I could do such and such thing better.

In addition to the code smell examples there are three programs to refactor in the end of the book. In a conversational tone, it walks through and gives some hints on what needs refactoring. Its almost as if you had a pair programming buddy working with you and identifying in small chunks what can be improved. This is definitely something I want to work through more carefully.

What I find odd, is that not all the code smells have code examples. The inspiration for the book I think is the Martin Fowler book “Refactoring Improving the design of Existing Code” which has examples for every code smell. Maybe Ruby smells less than Java? Or those fixes are really trivial? I don’t know. Overall, this is a great book and is certainly worth the price and investment and you will be a better programmer because of it!

There are explanations of “code smells” which are one characteristic of code that could be improved. Some of them are long parameter lists, unnecessarily complex, global variable, feature envy sections, etc. One thing I find interesting is the “How did it get this way?” section. It gives some insight into the thought process and reasoning behind the smell. I think this is good, as programmers our ego may be rather miffed to hear “This code stinks” but with some reasoning, it makes the pain less and I think firms up in our minds when this happens again, to do it this other way. I always want to know why when someone says I could do such and such thing better.

In addition to the code smell examples there are three programs to refactor in the end of the book. In a conversational tone, it walks through and gives some hints on what needs refactoring. Its almost as if you had a pair programming buddy working with you and identifying in small chunks what can be improved. This is definitely something I want to work through more carefully.

What I find odd, is that not all the code smells have code examples. The inspiration for the book I think is the Martin Fowler book “Refactoring Improving the design of Existing Code” which has examples for every code smell. Maybe Ruby smells less than Java? Or those fixes are really trivial? I don’t know. Overall, this is a great book and is certainly worth the price and investment and you will be a better programmer because of it!

Trying something new .. HAML... I saw it a couple years ago, I was like "ehh.. umm.. nah" ... But working on the DevChix site, it seems like it will be our choice instead of erb for templates so I thought I'd give it a try.

So here's some straight up html + erb

And same with haml:

I am not totally sold, but.. it is an interesting kind of markup!

Let me know if you see a better way to write it or if you prefer another markup language!

Call me crazy, but this is why I classify myself as a language geek. When I learn something fascinating, i wonder hmm how can I do that with X language? My last post I did an example of the Builder pattern as described in Effective Java by Joshua Bloch. The main motivation for me to use Builder is to have flexible parameter lists, without worrying about order of parameters (there are a few other reasons outlined in the book, but this is what I find cool).

Its too easy.

My class:

And the usage of it:

Wow, huh? Compare to

then the optional params are chained to that:

Full source for Ruby (though I was able to paste it all here!)
Address class in ruby | Address test in ruby

And for Java, if you want to compare ...
Address class in Java | Address test in java

Yes... sometimes its hard not to gloat.

yeah yeah yeah, its not really "fair" to compare strongly typed languages... but as I said, my motivation is to have easy parameter lists without having to remember specific ordering of params for constructor or use multiple set methods.

I have been reading Effective Java by Joshua Bloch and learned something new so I wanted to try it out.

Making long parameter lists in your constructor is not fun and prone to errors. Previously I thought that best way to handle this situation was to make a bunch of setter methods. This can get kind of tedious and hard to follow when there are alot of parameters:

Using a Builder object:

Using a builder class allows you to specify params in any order too!

Here is the source code for my Address class with Builder. The builder is implemented as a nested class since it will only be used by the Address class.

Address class with Builder

Test for Address class

The required parameters are set in the Builder constructor:

then the optional params are chained to that:

The book goes into more discussion that I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet, but this is interesting stuff .. even though it is java

I was pretty excited to find UiHandler, it makes the organization of code so much cleaner!

I am putting in the full code for both, so you can see the beauty for yourself! Pay attention to the comments where i put the gotchas that got me at first!
Before:

After:

See the constructure is further slimmed down!

Note: as of right now, you can only get this feature in Trunk. see here for how to download the source and use it More Info on release