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What do Zen and Zombies have in common? You probably got the beginning with the letter “Z”, but did you also guess Ruby? This blog post is to share two awesome and fun filled ways to learn Ruby and Ruby and Rails. First, let’s start with the Zen. Edgecase created a great way of learning Ruby. It is through Ruby Koans . Koans are a way of teaching Zen through questions. The master asks the student a question. The student then meditates on it until they come to the answer , eventually leading to enlightenment. The Ruby Koans are cleverly designed to teach bite size tidbits of the Ruby language through the completion of unfinished test cases. Each test case is a Koan. Every time you fix the test case by filling in the blanks, you are gaining a deeper understanding of the language. The main path_to_enlightment.rb file leads you through test cases that explore many areas of the languages such as Strings, Classes, Methods, and Exceptions. Enlightenment has never been so much fun. ...

There was a question today on Twitter about how to go about finding the word with the most consecutive consonants in the dictionary file. Of course, being a typical developer, when presented with a problem – I am usually not satisfied until I find a solution. Since I am interested in learning Clojure, I thought I would try to solve this problem functionally. Armed with Stuart Halloway’s “Programming Clojure” and trusty Google by my side, I embarked on my first Clojure mission. ...

_Photo by Valentin Baranovsky - Uliana Lopatkina and Danila Korsuntsev. _ Many moons ago, I spent a couple of years dancing with a ballet company. You wouldn’t think that much of that experience would transfer to development projects, but I give you an example in partnership, the can be applicable straight from the ballet world to the software world. The partnership in question is the one between the lead ballerina and the lead male dancer called a “pas de deux.” In many ballets, this dance involves the ballerina being a swan/princess and the male dancer being a prince/sorcerer. But in my example, it really doesn’t matter that much. The only important point is that they are the best dancers in the whole company. ...

If you are trying to run ruby rvm and rails 3.0 on Ubuntu you might run into this problem when you start up you server. LoadError: no such file to load -- openssl After much googling and researching – just installing the openssl library on your system won’t fix the problem. You need to recompile and install your rvm ruby version with the openssl. I found this fixed it for me. ...

In honor of the Ruby Why Day, I was inspired to dabble in Ruby Blocks after being reading “Fox In Socks” multiple times to my children before bed. For all of you parents out there that have read the book many, many times while your children are giggling at your pronunciation difficulties, I am sure this bit will be familiar: def fox_in_socks_blocks chicks_bricks = ["Chicks","bricks","blocks","clocks"] yield chicks_bricks[0..1] yield [chicks_bricks[0],chicks_bricks[2]] yield chicks_bricks end fox_in_socks_blocks do |sillywords| puts "#{sillywords[0]} with #{sillywords[1]} come." if sillywords.size < 3 puts "#{sillywords[0]} with #{sillywords[1]} and #{sillywords[2]} and #{sillywords[3]} come." if sillywords.size >= 3 end That’s right - the output is: Chicks with bricks come. Chicks with blocks come. Chicks with bricks and blocks and clocks come. ...

I am cruising along in my morning. I have a cup of tea in my hand and a good outlook on my tasks at hand. The code is flowing off of my fingertips. I am feeling pretty smart. Then the cloud moves in and the code darkens. I am at a roadblock. I try to google, I try debugging, I try calling in my fellow developers to see if they can see what the problem is… no luck. I bang my head unproductively for another hour and then go home. A fresh start in the morning and a fresh cup of day move me in a new direction, somehow I stumble upon the answer and quite frankly, it was so simple I can’t believe I missed it. I feel not so smart. This is one of the many smart-not-so-smart waves that rule the life of a developer. ...

I have always wanted to contribute to Open Source. I have reaped the benefits of using Open Source packages throughout the years, I sincerely want to give back. What has been stopping me all this time? Lack of time is my main excuse. I have two small children and by the time I clean up from dinner and get them bathed and off to bed, there is little time left to code. I tend to use this excuse for lots of other tasks that I avoid around the house, like closet cleaning, reorganizing the garage, etc … But an excuse is exactly what it is. ...

I decided to start playing with RDFs to start me on the road to understanding and programming Semantic Web. As always, the first step it to start with a “Hello World” type of exercise. In my case, I had armed myself with a good cappuccino at Starbucks and decided to set myself with a purl link and FOAF page. FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is one of the most popular vocabularies out there for RDF (Resource Description Framework). It expresses relationships in a machine readable format and is considered one of the first social Semantic Web applications. ...

I attended my first NFJS conference last weekend up in Columbus. Overall, it was an excellent experience. The speakers were all first rate and I got a chance to hang out and meet some other like-minded people who are interested in giving up a weekend to learn new technologies and generally just geek-out. The main technologies that stood out to me are concurrency and semantic web. Concurrency and functional programming are becoming more and more important with the ability to scale out on the server, rather then scale up (horizontal vs vertical scaling). There is always some threshold to the amount of power that you can throw at one system. However, that limit disappears if you can spread the load out across many servers. Java runs into some real problems with threads and concurrency. For this reason, the functional languages like Scala, Erlang, and Clojure are really starting to shine. I was so impressed with Clojure, that I picked up a book for my “play around and take a look at” tech stack. ...

I have been attending talks on functional programming languages at NFJS over the past couple of days. I have to admit it, I am really taken with the power of Scala and Clojure to tackle problems that Java cannot handle. I even purchased a Clojure book to add to my “languages to take a good hard look at” stack. I really believe that it is true that the functional languages have a lot to offer. ...