learn, laugh and move on!

There's been a lot going on lately and as a professional procrastinator I couldn't let go the chance of putting off writing a new blog post, but with things going back to normal (hopefully!) it's about time for a bit of reflection.

It's been a very social few weeks, ending May with a double bill: The software craftsmanship conference in Bletchley Park, and a coding day with the chaps of codingday.org here in Dublin.

What can I say about scuk11? it was a great day with fantastic sessions and I got to meet a great bunch of Spaniards in red t-shirts. Happy faces all over... yeah, the bar was already open!

The Dublin event was also fantastic and although it was first thought as a coderetreat, the addition of scientists and their real problems changed the nature of the session itself and made of it a fantastic coding day. The group I was working with got a spinning cube in the browser, with three different lights and three particles lighting up the cube with different colours. Great fun using the Three.js library!

The month of June started with @silverspoon organising hack nights in a café near the city centre, that I sadly missed because I was in Barcelona for a conference. Spain was great, as usual, although it was raining most of the time, but that didn't really have an impact on things such as meeting old friends, the great conversations we had, and of course, the fantastic food!

On Tuesday the 14th we had the first meet up for the SICP study group at P2PU. You can see what happened in the new wiki. This is an open group which basically means that you can join in anytime that suits you. We will meet twice a week for the next couple of months, Tuesdays and Sundays at 7pm GMT, 3pm EST. We are hoping to finish a section every two weeks, including exercises. As chapter one of the book has 3 sections, we are hoping for a 6 week period to be done with it. Wish us luck!!! or even better, join in!!!

Last night the first Ruby Project Night happened in armworks. The space is absolutely great and I want to thank Alan for hosting it. We didn't really know what to expect at first, and after a bit of chat and trying to get the projector going, we started hacking away in a rails 3 gem, something that none of us had done before. We didn't get too far but at least we got it packing and installing fine. As soon as the @theirishpenguin pushes it publicly I will share the link here. It was great to meet a bunch of enthusiastic people and looking forward to meeting them again!

This morning I read this 'Help Wanted' message from @oisin in the ruby Ireland list. If you are looking for contract Ruby work you should definitely get in touch with him. His last talk at ruby Ireland was really interesting.
In the thread he mentions that they like egoless programming which brought me back to the this old post of mine. Weingberg's book is a very recommended read even if as myself, you were not even born when it was written!

An finally, more to look forward to as the first 'technical' meet up of the Javascript Dublin group will be next Tuesday 21st at 7pm. A presentation about jQuery for web apps and a kata with Jasmine are in the menu. Are you really going to miss that???

Ruby and Regular Expressions

I have decided for the nth time to learn Ruby, mainly because I've been playing with ruby on rails apps for years now, but I do not have the language essentials to go beyond the typical functionality covered in tutorials or project documentation.

So for starters, I am reading the pragmatic book on ruby 1.9 which by the way, is on offer for only $10 this week (don't know for how long, so hurry up!). The book is very readable and to the point, as most of the titles in the pragmatic bookshelf.

And although the language is definitely different for me, coming from a Java background, I got immediately hooked by one aspect of it which till now had been, to say the least, a bit scary to me; the use of regular expressions.

As a Java developer I had used regexp before, but in a very limited and focused way, which happened to be the creation of validation expressions for fields in GUIs. I am not implying that this is the only use case for regexps in Java, no no no, but personally, I had only used them in that context before.

It is nice to see how in Ruby they are such a used technique, and the book encourages you to use them from very early. As I said, I had been scared of regexp in the past. I had even bought a couple of books about them that I never got to read.

So today I went looking for some easy resources in the shape or short videos that I can watch during lunch, ant I came across this one, which happens to explain the subject quite well, and it's accompanied by a long-ish post and even a few more videos. All very interesting if you are into this kind of thing!