I just got back from JRubyConf in Columbus, Ohio. I had a great time meeting other Rubyists and learned a great deal about how Ruby is being integrated into enterprise environments via JRuby. It’s really exciting to see “the big guys” embracing a language and ecosystem that we at Brighter Planet enjoy using on a daily basis.

I have been spending the past few weeks creating and refactoring our carbon model gems, with the goal of making them easy to enhance, fix, and test by climate scientists and Ruby developers. I wanted to make contributing a simple process and bundler fit the bill quite well.

I don’t follow Yehuda Katz’ blog (though I should) but he posted an article on basic gem configuration and build steps. It irks me to no end when I clone a git repo and run through the following process:

My wife is a graduate student who spends most of her time reading a ton of articles for her classes.  Once a week, she has to drive an hour and a half to Detroit for work.  One night, she was worried that she’d have enough time to work in Detroit and read all of her articles.  The proverbial light bulb went off in my head and I remembered a feature that Mac OS X has had since Jaguar (2002): Text to Speech.

Friday was my last day working in Ann Arbor (1hr away, by car, 4 by train/bike) at Greenview Data. At Greenview I had helped to build an email archiving system, writing mainly Ruby and Perl code using Agile (XP) development practices. Two of the best years of my career were spent there - I learned so much and discovered who I was as a software craftsman. My coworkers there helped keep me accountable and we had a great time learning together new concepts and some neat tools. In the end, we have an email archiving system that provides discoverability and redundancy across 3 data centers in the US.

My wife is a grad student who does quantitative studies from time to time. Her advisor recommended that she use SPSS to help her generate statistics from her research data. Of course, SPSS is a gigantic, bloated Java app developed by IBM. Being an IBM product targeted toward large institutions, it also costs an arm and a leg.  I really wish R was more well known and widely used because it is free software.