1. My First Rails Commit

    Today marked a bit of a milestone. I’m an advocate for open source and I love getting the chance to contribute back. I’ve corrected docs, reported bugs, fixed code, and released gems. Today I got to contribute back to a project that has done a lot for me.

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  2. Know Ruby: Enumerable grep

    Most of us are familiar with the grep program. If you work on a *nix system you’ve almost certainly used it or one of its newer kin. These programs allow for globally searching files with a regular expression and printing the results. It’s so common we use it as a verb.

    “Did you grep the code base before making that change?”

    Are you familiar with its Ruby counterpart? Ruby plays a bit fast and loose with the name but the underlying concept is similar. Let’s see what grep can do.

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  3. Find Me On SitePoint

    I’m proud to announce that you can now follow my work on SitePoint. Founded in 1999, SitePoint has long been a staple of web development education. Being able to join such a great team is quite an honor.

    You can find my first article Clojure Loops in Ruby in the Ruby section.

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  4. A New Atom Feed

    I recently changed my subscription feed to use the .atom extension. After reading Serving Atom feeds with GitHub Pages I’ve decided to make this change. The old feed will continue to work for a short while but please update your links. If you use Feedly please remove and re-add my feed. You can add it again easily by going to this subscription page and clicking the green “+feedly” button.

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  5. My site is was spam.

    One of my recent posts, Know Ruby: String Accessor, met with some success. I initially posted it to r/ruby where it received a good number of upvotes. People responded with comments like “Useful stuff here.” and “I found it to be very informative!”

    The following Thursday I found out the post had made its way into Ruby Weekly. With that came a lot more views and even more positive feedback on Twitter.

    It was quite an effort to research and write so I was thrilled to see people reading and enjoying it.

    Then I got an email from Ruby Weekly’s curator, Peter Cooper, and my day took a turn. There was a problem. The latest issue was being marked as spam in Gmail. My site was to blame.

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  6. Know Ruby: clone and dup
    Included in issue #205 of Ruby Weekly and episode #483 of Ruby5.

    Are you familiar with clone and dup? Quick, what’s the difference? For the uninitiated, they both create shallow copies of objects. Well, most objects. We’ll dig into that more later. Know this though, in a language with mutability, these methods can be a life saver.

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  7. Talking About Gems

    My first presentation at Dallas Ruby Brigade was last September. Given that I figured it was time to try my hand again. This time I did a presentation called “Polish Your Gem” which focused on making an existing gem better. I talked about using free services like Travis CI, supporting your users, and being welcoming to contributors.

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  8. Know Ruby: String Accessor
    Included in issue #198 of Ruby Weekly.

    I’ve decided to travel deep into the land of Ruby1 so that I may better know its secrets. I’ll be scouring it for the interesting, the useful and the inane. Re-examining parts that I thought I knew. Exploring forgotten methods and learning whatever I can. Rather than go it alone I hope you’ll join me.

    We’ll start our journey with the deceptively simple String accessor. Surely you’ve used the [] method but are you aware of all that it can do? Its plethora of signatures make it the Swiss Army Knife of String methods. Let’s delve in.

    1. Version 2.1.1 ↩

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  9. My First Lightning Talk

    This year marked the second ever Big Ruby conference and my first ever lightning talk at a conference. I’ve previously written about giving talks at work and at the local Ruby group. Presenting to an entire conference (it’s single track) is certainly more daunting. It was a lot of fun though. You can watch my talk below (starting at 3:22) or thumb through the slides.

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  10. A New Domain

    Welcome to my new domain. I recently moved this blog from http://ficate.com to where you find it now. The old domain was shorter and easier to spell but it never felt right. The pronunciation wasn’t obvious and it didn’t really provide any benefit.

    In addition to a new domain I’ve switched from Octopress to Jekyll.

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