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.

I’ve posted earlier about my attempts to find the perfect development environment on Linux, an environment that would match the elegance and ease of TextMate on OS X.  I’ve always been a fan of the freedom that you get with Linux and I’ve been willing to sacrifice prettiness as long as the environment is intuitive and easy to use.

Matt Wilson and I have been making some awesome new updates to CurbFu - our convenient wrapper for Ruby’s curb gem - itself an wrapper around libcurl.

Recently I was working on a project adding new functionality that would queue a long-running task to a background job. The original code looked something like this:

I’m really excited about the upcoming Great Lakes Ruby Bash in Ann Arbor on October 11th.  The distinguished Rubyists of the Grand Rapids Ruby Users Group are joining forces with us (Ann Arbor Ruby group) to put the conference together.  After attending eRubyCon in Columbus last weekend, I have to say the local conferences are much more engaging than the mega-conferences like RailsConf.  It’s great being able to get a chance to talk to everyone.  Hope to see you there!