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Peter Cooper
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1 month ago
in Ruby Best Practices - "And your Mom, too." Ruby-talk best practices. on Ruby Best Practices Blog
We should have some "Ruby RFCs" (RRFC?) and this should be number one! (I'm not even kidding - I've long thought we should have a semi-official way to nail down ideas in Ruby-land beyond blog posts that come and go and often disappear.)
1 reply
2 months ago
in Digital Signals: Alternatives to FeedBurner - The RSS publishing dilemma on Digital Signals
I was in a position to get into this market quite quickly (I ran a company called Feed Digest but sold it two years ago) at one stage. I figured I should explain why I didn't, perhaps these reasons are shared by others.
Firstly, it's a thankless task. FeedBurner has become essential to many, but people feel unaware of that when it just works. Most people also expect these services to be free or very cheap.
Secondly, it's an important task. If you have occasional bursts of downtime, people go NUTS! Even with Feed Digest, people went crazy if it went down for 10 minutes one time. This is high availability land, along with the grossly enlarged requirements and demands that makes upon all of your resources. Building high availability systems is not necessarily hard, from an architectural point of view, but it's very demanding. Couple demanding with "not much money" and you see the issue.
There are a few other issues, but those were the biggies for me.
Firstly, it's a thankless task. FeedBurner has become essential to many, but people feel unaware of that when it just works. Most people also expect these services to be free or very cheap.
Secondly, it's an important task. If you have occasional bursts of downtime, people go NUTS! Even with Feed Digest, people went crazy if it went down for 10 minutes one time. This is high availability land, along with the grossly enlarged requirements and demands that makes upon all of your resources. Building high availability systems is not necessarily hard, from an architectural point of view, but it's very demanding. Couple demanding with "not much money" and you see the issue.
There are a few other issues, but those were the biggies for me.
1 reply
Ed Richardson
I can imagine they are the major issues of anyone trying to establish themselves in the market.
The advantage for the likes of Google et al, would be they already have the infrastructure in place to support a large implementation/product like FeedBurner.
Charging for anything other than the very basic offering I suppose would assist with overheads, but as you say, the likes of me that run non-commercial blogs can't really afford to foot anything other than a minor costs, although it could be seen as an investment.
Sale of additional metrics to third parties I suppose could generate further revenues, but I suspect establishing a foot hold in that market is more tricky.
Thanks for the insight Peter.
It's easy to identify there being a hole in this specific market, but identifying why, isn't always as straight forward.
The advantage for the likes of Google et al, would be they already have the infrastructure in place to support a large implementation/product like FeedBurner.
Charging for anything other than the very basic offering I suppose would assist with overheads, but as you say, the likes of me that run non-commercial blogs can't really afford to foot anything other than a minor costs, although it could be seen as an investment.
Sale of additional metrics to third parties I suppose could generate further revenues, but I suspect establishing a foot hold in that market is more tricky.
Thanks for the insight Peter.
It's easy to identify there being a hole in this specific market, but identifying why, isn't always as straight forward.
6 months ago
in Microsoft Buys 37signals For $300 Million on Altgate
A year ago I'd have said this was ridiculous, but things are changing in a bit way out there, and especially at Microsoft. I'm on the fence as to whether they'd sell, but I definitely wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft made an offer like this at all.
MS has a big enough cash pile and if it can present a humble enough image of change where it's seen to really need new blood to grow and redefine itself into the future, I think it could pull on board quite a few big names. It wouldn't surprise me to see 37signals amongst them.
MS has a big enough cash pile and if it can present a humble enough image of change where it's seen to really need new blood to grow and redefine itself into the future, I think it could pull on board quite a few big names. It wouldn't surprise me to see 37signals amongst them.
1 reply
Peter Cooper
Oh, and don't be too dissuaded by the negative comments. A prediction of $42 oil would have been seen as nuts several months ago too, or the collapse of several of the world's largest financial institutions just a year or two ago.. Things change fast out there, and if MS has any sense, they'll be doing so too.
Keep making bold predictions - they might not come true, but the reality will be even more outrageous..
Keep making bold predictions - they might not come true, but the reality will be even more outrageous..
9 months ago
in Stupid Ruby Tricks at philcrissman.com on philcrissman.com
Try this ;-)
eval `cat #{$0}`
eval `cat #{$0}`
1 reply
philcrissman
Good alternative; although, 'puts' and 'eval' are the same length. I think those are as short as it gets for something like that.
Technically, using $0 is sort of "cheating" -- if I remember right, part of the challenge of writing a program whose output is its own source code was doing so without resorting to simply reading and outputting the source file... Using something like $0 is much easier, of course. :-)
Something like
Technically, using $0 is sort of "cheating" -- if I remember right, part of the challenge of writing a program whose output is its own source code was doing so without resorting to simply reading and outputting the source file... Using something like $0 is much easier, of course. :-)
Something like
_="_=%p;puts _%%_";puts _%_ (which I didn't write; found that at http://thisbindle.com/personal/ruby/)
Perhaps ruby-lang could fill in, being a Radiant site. RRFC pages could be added, and folks could comment.
Or use GitHub.
One concern is that there may be areas where there is no true consensus, but we end up with the appearance of an "official stance" because of who happens to be holding the editing reins at the time.
The last thing I want to have is someone pointing me to some arbitrary doc that says I'm supposed to use parentheses in my method definitions or some such thing.
But it would be nice to have a more permanent collection of well-considered Ruby ideas, collected from whatever sources, even if it contains contradictions; something to give a reasonably grounded basis for deciding how to go about certain things.
For example, I'm sure there is no unanimous thought on how to structure a project tree, but I bet there are two or three solid ways to do it, with good arguments for each, so at least people do not have to figure this out from scratch every time, or dig up old r-t posts to see what people suggested in the past.
If not RRFCs, then a sort of curated Best of Ruby Thought sort of thing.