On simplicity

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

— Albert Einstein

Posted by Olly on October 3, 2007 at 9:21 am in quotations
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On Perfection

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

(p.s. Thanks Andy)

Posted by Olly on at 9:19 am in quotations
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RailsConf Europe 2007

After turning up at the airport, enduring a 40-minute queue at security followed by an anxious sprint to the gate with 5 minutes to spare, I finally made it to a sun-drenched Berlin. Andy and I spent the day before the conference visiting the sights of Mitte, the centre of Berlin, with the Reichstag, the Berliner Dom and the Holocaust Memorial being particularly memorable. The Bauhaus Archive was somewhat less so.

Here are the highlights of the conference for me.

Dave Thomas Keynote

Oddly timed as it was (7.30pm the day before the main conference started), Dave’s keynote was pretty inspirational and a great way to kick off the conference. The message was simple: create something great.

Drawing on software development best practices (prototyping, iterative development, test-driven development), the presentation was passionately delivered and very educational. There are a lot of young developers at RailsConf, some of whom might be using Ruby as their first language, many more having ‘graduated’ from a PHP background (like DHH himself). Some of these guys (and, unfortunately, it was 95% guys at this conference) might not have the computer science background of others who’ve been coding for a decade or more, so Dave speaking about these important concepts in such an accessible way was great to hear.

David Heinemeier Hansson Keynote

It wouldn’t be a Rails conference without a keynote from the Rails inventor himself. David is an assured presenter, and this presentation — all about the forthcoming Rails 2.0 — was primarily a live demo.

Rails 2.0 looks much improved over it’s predecessor (which in itself is really saying something!), introducing ‘sexy migrations‘ as standard, cookie-based sessions, more work on routing (including namespaces), HTTP authentication and — perhaps best of all — a debugger. I used Java and Eclipse for so long (and before that C++ with Visual Studio) that I felt I was missing a limb when I first started with Rails. No IDE, no debugger… WTF?! Of course I’ve learned that an IDE is totally unnecessary when you have TextMate, but I still miss being able to put a breakpoint in my code and step through rather than relying on script/console or a bunch of logger statements. So I’m pretty excited about Rails 2.0, but not excited in the slightest about all the new Rails IDEs which are now being offered.

Dr Nic Williams: Meta-Magic in Rails: Become a Master Magician

Dr Nic is a good speaker. Forthright and funny, he talked about how to do some hardcore meta-programming in Rails. Some of it practical, most of it not, but being practical wasn’t the point! I’m not sure how often I’ll use anything Nic talked about, but his talk was memorable and I now properly understand method_missing. And I also have the Guess Method gem in my toolkit should I ever need it (ahem).

Britt Selvitelle: Really Scaling Rails

Britt is from Twitter so he knows a thing or two about scaling a Rails app. The concepts he talked about were only practical if you already have scaling issues (which we don’t yet with FreeAgent, although I’m hoping we will soon!), but they were very useful nonetheless. I’m still open-mouthed about the fact that they reject requests when all the Mongrel instances are busy. Lucky for Twitter, they can do this because they massively-scaled system means that the scenario where all Mongrel instances are busy never occurs!

The fundamental point though, was that there are two categories of problem:

• Too much time spent in the application
• Too much time spent in the DB

Solve these and use memcached for virtually everything (Twitter use the pure Ruby implementation), then your scaling problems are sorted :-)

Rob McKinnon: Parliament on Rails: Constructing a Social Web Application from Semi-structured Data

The longest title of the conference and, alongside Dave Thomas’ keynote, probably the best presentation. Rob has worked incredibly hard to produce www.theyworkforyou.co.nz — a Rails-based application which screen-scrapes Hansard, cleverly categories the data and makes it publicly available. Not only has he done this all by himself, he’s managed to do it in his spare time, voluntarily. That’s some effort and it’s hugely admirable. Bravo!

In conclusion

RailsConf Europe 2007 was a really well organised conference. The venue was good, with big rooms and plenty of space for socialising. Everyone was helpful, everything was really well organised and the food was outstanding. I think I’ll definitely return next year.

Posted by Olly on September 24, 2007 at 2:19 pm in railsconfeurope, railsconfeurope07
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Prince at The O2, 28th August 2007

I got too many hits

I’ve always wanted to see Prince play live. Despite all the purple weirdness you read about and that whole thing, he’s the most amazingly talented musician who’s written (literally) hundreds of classic songs, all of which sounds fantastic today.

I went to one of his ‘21 Nights in London’ shows at the dome last night and was blown away with his performance, not to mention that of Maceo Parker (I had no idea he was part of the band) who — I kid you not — held a high note on his sax for over 60 seconds, whilst walking around the stage.

In a word: sensational.

Here’s the set list (thanks to prince.org):

• Let’s Go Crazy
• 1999
• Take Me With You
• 7
• Come Together
• Cream
• U Got The Look
• Musicology
• Play That Funky Music
• Funky London
• What a Wonderful World (Maceo Parker)
• Diamonds and Pearls (on Synth)
• The Beautiful Ones (on Synth)
• Little Red Corvette (on Synth)
• Raspberry Beret (on Synth)
• Come On
• Black Sweat
• Sign Of The Times
• Alphabet Street
• When Doves Cry
• I Wanna Be Your Lover
• Purple Rain
• I Feel 4 U
• Controversy
• Nothing Compares 2 U

Posted by Olly on August 29, 2007 at 4:49 pm in music, prince
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Turn off the lights

HSBC, the worlds fourth richest company (with an incomprehensible 1.8 trillion dollars in assets), is making the news by boasting about their newly-acquired eco-credentials. It dawned on them last year that they could boost their profits by automatically switching off desktop computers at night, which is a fantastic move (perhaps they could open source the software?), but it does makes me wonder when they’ll realise that switching off the lights at their 1-million-square-foot, 42-story, Canary Wharf skyscraper might be good for the planet (not to mention their bulging assets) too?

Posted by Olly on July 17, 2007 at 8:00 am in environment, london, news
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