Technical Writing
I am interested in technology, as part of my work and outside. This section of devmull contains some book reviews, conference reviews and articles I’ve written; one of which became part of an O’Reilly book.
I am interested in technology, as part of my work and outside. This section of devmull contains some book reviews, conference reviews and articles I’ve written; one of which became part of an O’Reilly book.
A couple of days ago I attended an Unconfernce called Leancamp. My main reason for going was that David Heinemeier Hansson - the creator of RubyOnRails and co-author of Getting Real and Rework was speaking.
Rework is largely a rehash of Getting Real, but with the focus moved away from people who write software, onto people involved in all aspects of running a business. The refocussing allows Fried and DHH to reach a far wider audience with their opinions. Their wisdom, gained by experience, of how to deliver software will be read by people who would have never considered reading Getting Real. That’s pretty savvy market positioning and something that wouldn’t have been achieved by a series of blog posts on their website.
I was lucky enough to be a beta-tester for MongoHQ, the hosted MongoDB service. Yesterday (20100226) they came out of private beta, and launched their pricing options to the world. The results, as MongoMapper author John Nunemaker tweeted, were surprising…
I’m very happy that my contribution to the O’Reilly JRuby Cookbook has been accepted. It is only a little bit on making SOAP calls from Ruby (JRuby) using the Mule ESB Client library, but it is still really nice to see my name inside a book.
I have been working on a project which uses the Mule ESB, and a JRubyOnRails app. Part of this means calling SOAP services from within the JRuby app. Ola Bini sets out a couple of approaches in his JRuby on Rails book,but I thought I would blog the success I’ve had using the mule-client libraries. I am passing “complex” Java objects around in these SOAP services, not just primitives - always more difficult when it comes to SOAP interoperability.
This is a reprint of an article I wrote for Ping Wales (now sadly closed) back in July 2006 covering Mark Shuttleworth’s keynote speech at ApacheCon.
Despite being on record as disliking public speaking, Mark Shuttleworth was in Dublin last month to give the keynote speech at this year’s ApacheCon Europe.
His theme was the future direction of open source software (OSS), and the issues developers should focus on to ensure the OSS movement’s continued success.In true cosmonaut style, Shuttleworth’s ApacheCon Europe presentation took the form of a countdown of the issues facing OSS developers.
There are plenty of coders in the world and in the mid 1990s, not a few of them tried their hands at creating a technology start-up company. The majority of those start-ups failed in due course - but one of them succeeded, and in doing so, became a part of dotcom legend. In 1998, Yahoo! paid $49 million for Viaweb Inc., a company whose market-leading Viaweb Store software and reporting tools powered the majority of all e-commerce sites then in existence. Not only is Viaweb Store thought to be the world’s first web-based application, it was written using Lisp - one of the oldest programming languages still in relatively wide use.