The Blog that Noone Reads

Shared Items

Dave Grijalva — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:36:18 +0000

I haven’t been posting much lately. I would like to get back to it, but I’m not sure where I want to do that. In the meantime, I use google reader to share things I find interesting.

Check out my feed.

Also, you can see a snapshot of recent items over there in the right column.

GoGaRuCo Talk This Friday

Dave Grijalva — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 21:50:18 +0000

I mentioned previously that I’ll be speaking at GoGaRuCo 2011. Well, the conference begins this friday. If you weren’t lucky enough to get a ticket before it sold out, fear not. Talks will be streamed live to the interwebs at a URL to be announced.

Check out the schedule to see who’s speaking about what and when. It’s going to be a great conference. Hope to see you there.

GoGaRuCo 2011

Dave Grijalva — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 19:38:37 +0000

I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be joining Ruby great such as Yehuda Katz, José Valim, and Ilya Grigorik on the speakers list at this year’s Golden Gate Ruby Conference. My talk will be on the Go programming language.

Ruby takes inspiration from many programming languages that came before it. It aspires to make complicated programming tasks simpler. Go provides a similar simplification for lock-free concurrent programming though a few simple language features. Even though Ruby is over ten years old, this is no time to stop looking outwards for inspiration.

Come see an introduction to Go, a demonstration of how Go does concurrency, and how these concepts are applicable within the Ruby community.

Is this thing on?

Dave Grijalva — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 18:35:32 +0000

Some people write about how long it’s been since they’ve posted. I’m not going to do that.

Wine Tour

Dave Grijalva — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:23:29 +0000

Before we all got drunk

To celebrate my recent completion of 26 laps around the sun, Kate arranged a trip to Napa for us and some friends.

Photography-ing

Dave Grijalva — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 11:14:22 +0000

A Hobbit Hole in San Francisco?

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, but I’m trying to get out with my camera when the weather is good. Here are some shots from a recent trip to Crissy Field.

Team Coco

Dave Grijalva — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 09:56:19 +0000

Credit

Dear Santa

Dave Grijalva — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:38:43 +0000

This year, I have everything I want.

Fireflies

Dave Grijalva — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:22:04 +0000

My friend made a cover of Fireflies by Owl City. It’s mostly a cappella and fully awesome.

Forward Compatibility with Ruby 1.9

Dave Grijalva — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:54:19 +0000

Rails 3.0 is going to fully support Ruby 1.9. It’s a good thing, too, since 1.9 is much faster and has some important improvements. What that means is that, eventually, if not now, you’ll want to at least make sure your code runs in 1.9. A while back, I went through the differences between 1.8 and 1.9 with an eye for forward compatibility issues. I’ve picked out what I think the major gotchas are. Avoid these in your code and it should make moving to 1.9 a lot easier.

Hashes are now ordered. This really shouldn’t cause problems for you, since the order of hashes in 1.8 are not to be trusted. You may want to consider an alternate implementation of OrderedHash once you go to 1.9 so eliminate unnecessary work.

Object now has a superclass, BasicObject. You should checkout the Pickaxe for the reasons behind this, but it’s important that you don’t rely on Object.superclass being nil.

The grammar for single line if statements has changed. Specifically, then is now the blessed form. The : form has been removed.

The retry command has been removed from looping. It is still available for exception handling, though. I doubt anybody here really used this. Don’t start.

The scoping rules for blocks have changed. This is probably the most likely to bite you because it’s an easy thing to miss. The change is that, in 1.9, block parameters are always private to the block. The best way to protect yourself from this is to never share a local variable name with a block parameter name.