GrokBlok

Take advantage of user data to create intelligent Rails applications! This talk will focus on data mining to create complex application behavior and gain insight into the patterns and habits of your users. Examples of these techniques can be seen with recommendation systems like those created by Amazon, Netflix, last.fm, and others. Additional examples include spam filtering systems for email or comment filtering provided by Akismet.

I will focus on techniques for gathering data, specific gems and plugins for performing various data mining and machine learning tasks, and performance issues like how to distribute the work to separate servers. Theory in this talk will be light and the specific algorithms will only get a mention by name. We’ll be looking at real world Ruby and Rails code examples for building recommendation, ranking, and classification systems.

Sounds fascinating. I also found it interesting that one of my former employers, JPMorganChase is a sponsor. If you have the means to attend, I’d really recommend it. I’ll wager there will be scotch, but probably not any Highland Games.

For those of you in the Columbus area, I’ll be speaking at the Columbus Ruby Brigade meeting this evening regarding Rails 2.0. This will be a high-level talk around some of the new things and some of the deprecated behaviours in everyone’s favorite web framework.

So, it would appear that the Rails trademark discussion isn’t quite over. On the 27th of July, Dr. Nic Williams registered a trademark for:

• Educational publications, namely, training manuals in the field of information technology
• Dissemination of advertising, scheduling and managing of training courses and programs for others via a global computer
• Arranging professional workshop and training courses

This is in addition to the one originally filed by David Heinemeier Hansson about the usage of Ruby on Rails in Computer software, namely, software framework for developing web applications. Apparently, that one isn’t completely through the door, yet.

What does all this mean? 1) Patent and trademark law seems completely jacked up in the US. 2) It means that the name of a thing is valuable, not the thing itself.

For those of you thinking about filing a trademark on your service, let me ask a question. Are you a great Rails developer, or are you a great developer who uses Rails?

I am no longer an innocent bystander to the world of open source projects. I’ve had my very first patch applied to a code base. While working on a tiny Rails project, I used Rick Olsen’s restful_authentication plugin/generator. The tests failed immediately due a change in the api for assert_difference. I made the changes, and submitted a patch to Rick, and he applied it last night, along with a couple of other small changes.

I’ve been wanting to start getting involved with more patching, but just haven’t had the opportunity. I even set-up a specific workspace on my laptop just for things that I’m going to be patching, that way I can keep it separate from my own projects.

How exciting!

It’s that recently there has been a lot of interest in communicating with people through Internet Relay Chat, or at least in the corner of the internet that I frequent. I think it’s a really flexible medium that lends itself to instant collaboration. One of the areas that I think it could bear much fruit is in the way of online help.

That’s one of the reason’s that I suggested starting the #columbusrb channel. Think of it this way, if you are not working in an all Ruby shop, how do you get your help? Mailing lists? Blogs? These are all valid, but sometimes, there’s a more immediate need for help. I envision #columbusrb to be a place where people can come to for help, it’s my effort to help spur the community on to larger growth. If you work in a large company, and you’re trying to bring ruby in, look to some of these channels for instant help.

Do take the time and check out some of these channels, my nick is ch0wda, which is an obscure Mayor Quimby reference from a Simpson’s episode, if you must know. I plan on posting some more about IRC in the coming weeks.

• #columbusrb – Home of the Columbus Ruby Brigade
• #camping – Devoted to the greatest 4KB MVC framework on the interwebs, Camping
• #rails-contrib – Follow along as patches and tickets get worked on the Rails Trunk
• #midwest.rb – A great collection of Rubyists from all over the Midwest dedicated to helping each other out.

• #merb – A lot of really cool work is going into this framework of Mongrel + ERB
• #jruby – Many people keep a watchful eye over how this project is turning out
• #emacs – The IDE that acts as an operating system
• #ruby-lang – Discuss your favorite language

Why does it seem like these people are always so uptight about you installing anything on “their” machines? I realize that the majority of their day is spent trying to help the most computer illiterate people figure out why IE won’t do this or that, but I promise you that I will never call them for support. If they hate their jobs so much, just go ahead and become a developer, or system administrator. I’m not saying that they aren’t valuable and necessary workers, but the future tells me that desktop support is a new entrant into “blue-collar” work.

I recently have attempted to get a desktop computer to go along with nice laptop in order to demo some things for my users internally. By their reaction, you would have thought that I was asking to setup a datacenter in the bathroom. I guess that’s what I get for being an outsider.

One important part of my professional life is constantly questing for ways to enhance my abilities and skills. I think an unused brain is a dull brain and business requires sharpness at all times. One area that I focus on for this is problem/puzzle solving. I do sudoku, but I’ve never had the desire to do crosswords. David Black got me thinking about the nature of both types of puzzles in a post he made on sudoku solutions.

Sudoku is more of an introspective puzzle, it’s cleaner, it’s lighter, and my feeling is that it fits in perfectly with Japanese culture. I solve sudoku internally. There is no context needed, I look at the puzzle, and everything that I need is right there. Crossword puzzles are focused on the external, they are word oriented. Each clue has a context around it that I need to have awareness of. This could be word meaning, cultural history, or even the ability to ask someone else for a quick clue. It seems that sudoku would be good for you to sharpen your problem-solving skills, however crosswords would seem to enhance your context-solving skills. This leads me further into my discovery of what goes into “good” dialogue within the context of effectively communicating with my clients/customers as to their wishes. I hope to be posting more on these theories in the weeks to come.

I just wanted to give a shoutout to Dan for his interview on Working with Rails. He finished 2nd in their Hackfest, and as a result, is going to RailsConf for free. Of course, my favorite part of the interview had to be the answer to the question about how Dan got involved with Rails:

When I started working for JPMorganChase I did web development in PHP. In the fall of 2005 Joshua Schairbaum, my colleague, started using Rails and really liked it. He encouraged me to check it out, and soon we were using Rails for all our small projects. After successful delivery of several small web apps, Josh was able to sell Rails to upper management, and we now use Rails for a very large access administration application.

The “sell” to upper management went pretty smoothly due to the fact that we were delivering, in no small part to Dan’s efforts. Neither he, nor I work at the monolithic bank anymore, but I think he’s going to be making some waves at Thoughtworks, just as I plan to do at my new employer.

I just want to say thanks, Dan! Also, in the interview, he mentions a plugin by our good friend, John X Andrews. I highly recommend that plugin for all your scoping needs.

...it[Rails] can have a dramatic impact on the speed at which a Web development team is able to build and maintain enterprise Web sites and applications.

The emphasis in the quote is mine, and I think it’s very telling that Rails is being billed as an enterprise solution for companies because of it’s speed and maintainability. That pretty much sums up my experience with Rails thus far, and I think the first fruits of early adopters are starting to be harvested. Being a member of the second wave, I feel that I’m in a great position to be able to speak with authority on ways to ease Rails in the door at large corporations.

Equal parts design philosophy and development environment, Rails offers developers a few key code-level advantages when constructing database-backed Web applications.

If you are running or working in a large monolithic corporation and you’re not at least evaluating Rails’ position in your company, why not?

I’m really not into any of the social aspects of the web at a macro-level. I’ve never been to MySpace, I don’t IM, it’s just not my thing. Recently, I’ve discovered LinkedIn, and I have to say that I really enjoy it. I’m not sure that I would ever use the site itself for a job search, but I would however use it to meet new people who I might be able to help in the future, and vice versa. One of the coolest features thus far is the ability to search my gmail contacts list and send invitations to my contacts asking them to connect with me.

Guy Kawasaki has written a great article about some of the benefits of using LinkedIn. One of the more compelling reasons that I think are increasing your visibility, but that also brings me to another problem. I know have profiles on LinkedIn, Technorati, WorkingWithRails, and …. am I missing any? I’m wishing there were a single This-Is-Me online identity manager for the web. Perhaps I just need to pick a horse and go with it.

You can find the article here: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/01/ten_ways_to_use.html

You can find my public profile here.

Last Monday, Dan Manges and I gave a talk at the Columbus Ruby Brigade about some techniques for bringing Rails into the enterprise. I believe that there are 2 ways of doing this. The first is attempting to make Rails a little more “enterprisey”, and I don’t mean sacrificing a lot of the things that make Rails great, but modifying some of it’s behaviors, such as support for composite keys and that type of thing. Basically, all the things that Dave Thomas talked about at RailsConf this year. The second approach is a bit more subversive, and that is to make the enterprise environment a little more Rails-like. It’s culture changing, and that’s what we focus on. This is the approach that would appear to be favored by DHH. I think both ways are valid because they have the same ends, just different means. Each situation is different and this approach works for us at JPMorganChase. So without further ado, here are the slides from the presentation, and I hope to have a podcast of our presentation edited by this weekend.

UPDATE The podcast is now available.

• PowerPoint: crb-enterprise-rails.zip
• Podcast: crb-enterprise-rails-podcast.mp3

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Once of the benefits of never throwing anything is away is going back and finding pieces of information that you’ve acquired over the years. For instance, I was cleaning out my garage this weekend when I stumbled upon a packet from a seminar titled, “Peak Performance for Wrestling: Sport Psychology Training for Mental Toughness” given by Dr. Chris Stankovich, of Champion Athletic Consulting. This was a great seminar and some of these principles I’ve tried to translate for myself off the mat and into the cubicle.

The basic gist of the seminar was establishing peak performance in wrestling by setting goals of varying length while focusing on 3 elements: physical, technical, and mental. As I was reading this, it brought to my mind the benefits that those of us in the technology field could take as lessons learned. The analogy may be a stretch for some, but stick with me. No group of individuals have a more focused “singularity of purpose” than wrestlers. I think it could be said that those in technology or even business rely on many of the same principles. While most of us are part of a team, when all the fat is boiled it, it’s all about individual performance.