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Ruby Rogues
Ruby Rogues episodes
- MRS 066: Nassredean Nasseri
Panel: Charles Max Wood
Guest: Nassredean Nasseri
This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Dean who is a senior software engineer at VTS, Inc. in New York City. Dean uses Ruby and is an advocate for the software. He and Chuck discuss his background, current projects, and more!
In particular, we dive pretty deep on:
1:00 – Dean: Hi, Everyone!
2:07 – Chuck: E363 of Ruby Rogues is your past episode.
1:13 – Dean: I am a Ruby developer and out in NY City. I have been developing Ruby for the past 6 years now.
1:42 – Chuck: What made you want to do something like Fir?
1:50 – Dean: I love developing developer tools and using something that I can use in my day-to-day work – I like that. I am constantly debugging and trying new things. That’s how I operate. I wanted to build a tool that would take the concepts that were missing from IRB and...put in a shell like FITCH. That was the motivation to that project.
2:42 – Chuck: Check out his past episode to get into the nitty gritty. Let’s roll back – how did you get into programming?
3:10 – Dean: I started programming in 2009/2010. I was a senior in High School and I wanted to make a social media website. I knew about HTML and other things but databases and servers I had no idea about. I downloaded WAMP – you familiar? It stands for: WINDOWS APACHE, MYSQL, and PHP.
4:19 – Chuck: What about programming that got you started?
4:27 – Dean: To build the thing that was in my head. My motivation was I wanted to see this THING to get built. I had a UI and I used jQuery. I got further and further; I realized that I was enjoying it. I liked the feeling and I spent 6 hours and I felt rewarded.
5:12 – Chuck: I played with programming as a younger person but in college I was introduced to...and I liked something coming together. Programming felt like a toy for me. I built a platform for people to find an apartment with their amenities that they wanted. It never came to light but it was fun to build.
6:00 – Dean.
6:12 – Chuck: I was a software consultant for a while. They spent 10’s of thousands of dollars on this project and me. You get into PHP and how did you come to Ruby?
6:40 – Dean: I didn’t study computer science in college. My friends who had a “background” and they said that I needed to use Python. Python held me back b/c of the 2 to 3 split and the server getting up on my machine b/c certain tendencies needed x, y, and z. That drove me away from Python but I did like the language. My friend told me to try Ruby and I read a book (Ruby on Rails by Michael, 2nd ed.) and I got Ruby. That was really cool to me. I went through the tutorial and that was powerful for me. Motto: Keep things fun and simple and then build on things later.
8:59 – Chuck: I hear people complain about Ruby. Can you still do that?
9:13 – Dean: Yes, I think so. The thing that stands out to me is action cable. Maybe a beginner doesn’t want to have to think about. Rails is the best way to get up and running with minimum friction.
9:45 – Chuck: I worked through a company and I was their tech support – so I can relate to that. Other things that people worry about: Action Cable, etc. you don’t have to worry about that until later. That makes sense. What have you done that your proud of?
10:24 – Dean: I worked at a company and proud of the certain features I have built and shipped. I am proud of learning more and more about Ruby internals. I am proud of FIR, too.
11:43 – Chuck: Yeah, FIR does sound interesting. I hear people say that often: I built this thing and it makes a difference in this way. What are you working on now?
12:11 – Dean: Tech Ops; it’s a hybrid between DevOps and...
We have worked on projects like migrating CAM CAM CAM to PUNDIT. That was the last huge Ruby project we’ve worked on.
Our ongoing mission is to make sure things are up to date.
I have been migrating from our former CI provider to Circle CI. It’s been a challenge. It requires DOCKER and it was important for us to use...
(Dean goes into more detail.)
Dean: We have been working on flaky tests, which was more Ruby focused.
(Dean goes into more detail.)
15:42 – Chuck: I am curious to see what those tips are?
15:49 – Charlie McMillan – check out his blog post: Tips to Fixing Flaky Feature Specs. There is a real art to it.
16:06 – Chuck: Anything else?
16:16 – Dean: That’s pretty much the good stuff.
16:24 – Chuck: Over the course of your career what is an overarching theme?
16:42 – Dean: From the technological side – not really – but important to my development is empathy. Develop empathy for your colleagues, and customers. I love the tech stuff, but I made mistakes. I was so tech focused that maybe at the expense of my team. The soft skills are really important to this business. Being empathetic in this field and this is equally as important to being a really good empathetic person.
18:03 – Chuck: As we continue to see things grow – you can build small applications on your own. But when you are building a Facebook or something complex – then at that point your ability to work with people trumps your technical abilities. Once your past that can you work with other people?
19:06 – Picks!
19:14 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!
Links:
- Ruby
- Elixir
- Rails
- Rust
- Dean’s Medium
- Dean’s Website
- Dean’s GitHub
- Dean’s Flickr
Sponsors:
- Get a Coder Job
- Cache Fly
- Fresh Books
Picks:
Charles
- Get A Coder Job
- Book: Scourged by Kevin Hearne
- Down? Depressed? Try taking care of other people!
Dean
- VTS b/c we are hiring
- Book: Iran Awakening – By Nobel Peace Prize Winner
29 min - RR 385: “Ruby/Rails Testing” with Jason SwettPanel:
- Dave Kimura
- Eric Berry
- Nathan Hopkins
- David Richards
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.1 hr 3 min - MRS 065: Nell Shamrell-Harrington
Panel: Charles Max Wood
Guest: Nell Shamrell-Harrington
This week on My Ruby Story, Chuck talks with Nell who is a principle engineer at Chef. Check them out at Chef.Io. She also works with Operation Code. This organization helps veterans to learn code, and helps them get a technical job. Check out today’s episode where Chuck and Nell discuss Ruby, Rust, and much more!
In particular, we dive pretty deep on:
2:00 – Chuck: Episode 105 is another episode you’ve been on before.
2:25 – Chuck: I want to spotlight you and talk about what you are working on. How did you get into programming?
2:38 – Nell: I was a theater major in college. I graduated in 2007 and the big financial crisis hit in 2008. I found work at the Physics Department in Seattle. Once they found out that I knew how to code, they gave me more coding to do.
When you are doing just the mathematics portion – you don’t see how this applies to real life. I didn’t pursue it because I didn’t see how it worked in the real world. Then I saw eventually how my theater background really helped me with coding because you have to be super creative.
After that (this is when I got into Ruby) my roommate in college sent me a message. She was working with Ruby, too, and she wanted to bring me on as a junior developer.
5:55 – Chuck: It’s interesting, too, to see what you just said. Not seeing the real-world application with some of that stuff. I can relate to that. I wanted to get into IT after college. The other thing is that it was someone you KNEW to get you into Ruby. People get into a specific framework because of someone that they knew/know.
6:54 – Nell: Yes, it’s the personal testimonies that help people make those decisions.
7:13 – Chuck: It was someone that you KNEW that helped you get X job.
7:24 – Nell: Yes, in Operation Code, too. Take a look at this candidate (normally you wouldn’t look at them b/c of their CV) and take a chance on them.
8:09 – Chuck: One thing that I am curious about what’s been your favorite thing to work on with Ruby?
8:38 – Nell: I worked on the supermarket product. Cookbook is a chef recipe for infrastructure...
We weren’t just running a site that people were using. They were saying: we love it, but we are behind a firewall. They couldn’t use the public one and they wanted a private one. The answer was: Yes! That was the first time I worked on software – packaged and distributed. I loved the breadth of the industries that it had an affect on. It was cool to see different industries use my work through a Ruby on Rails application. Ruby does scale!
10:42 – Chuck: Let’s talk about your work at Chef. You worked on Supermarket and then what was the distributed part to it?
11:05 – Nell: Chef Omnibus was the tool we used. You could take that package and install it on the infrastructure...
11:33 – Chuck: I worked at a university for a while. The work I did was that the access to the Internet was limited. Chef would have been nice!
11:58 – Chuck: What did you do at Blue Box?
11:59 – Nell: Software engineer there and we were a hosting company. We had a Rails application...
I helped write the code.
12:29 – Chuck: What are you working on now?
12:32 – Nell: I am working on a project called Habitat.
Nell talks about what THIS project is and how it functions. Check it out!
14:20 – Chuck: How did you get into Operation Code?
14:26 – Nell: Both my parents were air force operators. I wanted to but I had a physical limitation so I couldn’t. I grew up in military culture from 0-14 years old. After that I realized in my 20’s I really missed it. After the military it’s scary because you don’t have (maybe) a sense of purpose like you did in the military.
She asked how she could help and someone referred her to Operation Code. She realized she could be an asset and help these veterans. She works with close to 3,000 veterans to help them give a purpose after military life. They learn code and then hopefully find a technical job.
17:13 – Chuck: I spent some years around that life, too, when I was a missionary overseas. My brother-in-law was medically discharged. You see this change and it can be scary for them. You wind up in this position and you want to help. I admire this. These folks have sacrificed for us so let’s make a difference for them, too.
18:35 – Nell: My friend said that she didn’t like it when people thanked her for her service. She said that so many warzones it seems empty. When she heard this it was powerful to her.
19:40 – Chuck: How can people get involved?
19:43 – Nell: Operation Code – Hit the JOIN link. You can sign-up to be a volunteer. The slack community is where all the magic happens.
20:24 – Chuck: Anything else?
20:28 – Nell: Habitat is written in Rust. I haven’t done tons in Ruby right now. But what I am known in Ruby is for regular expressions. People have told me that it has helped them a lot.
22:14 – Nell: Regular expressions can be a lot of fun but they are mind numbing at first. Seeing an example can help.
22:33 – Chuck: Habitat is written in Rust. What’s that transition like from Ruby to Rust?
22:49 – Nell: I took a Latin course. Learning Rust was like learning Latin in that it’s a HUGE learning curve. However, in both that I stopped fighting with the language. And stepped back to see why it was doing what it’s doing. In Rust there is no Garbage Collector.
My Ruby experience did give me a leg-up.
Nell continues to talk about the differences between Rust and Ruby.
24:30 – Chuck: Which language do you like better?
24:34 – Nell: Personally, Ruby but for this project Rust!
24:45 – Chuck: We were talking about the tradeoffs between...
25:01 – Nell: Yes, choose the language that works for THAT project and for your team.
25:17 – Chuck: How can people find you?
25:23 – Nell: Twitter. I check it throughout the day, so feel free to DM me. GitHub, too.
I have gotten back to voice acting so check that out!
26:11 – Advertisement – Fresh Books!
Links:
- Ruby
- Elixir
- Rails
- Rust
- Operation Code
- Nell Shamrell-Harrington's LinkedIn
- Nell Shamrell’s Twitter
- Nell Shamrell’s GitHub
- Chef.Io
Sponsors:
- Get a Coder Job
- Cache Fly
- Fresh Books
Picks:
Charles
- Frameworks Summit
- Podcast Conference
- Home Depot Tool Rental
Nell
- New speed eradicator for Facebook
- The Daiso Store!
33 min - RR 384: “Sonic Pi” with Sam AaronPanel:
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/kobaltz
- Eric Berry
Special Guest: Sam AaronIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Sam Aaron who is the creator of https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/graphs/contributors, which is the main topic that he and the panel talk about today. Sam is a computer scientist who has his Ph.D., and uses the Ruby language. He is also a programmer, educator, live coding musician, and father.Show Topics:1:25 – Panelist: Tell us what you are doing?1:27 – Sam: Good question. I do a lot of different things and I try to challenge programming and take it a newHow can I be the most expressive person with code? I have written things to write music with code.2:00 – Code is just a medium like dancing and writing. You can write to write code but as to write poetry.2:33 – Tell us about Sonic Pi – the project you have developed to generate music from code.2:42 – Sam: It’s a very simple program. It’s an app that you can run on Mac or Windows and others. It was written as a response to the UK opening a new system. How can we get children engaged? And this was my answer to that question.3:37 – Was this developed by a team?3:41 – Sam: Most of it was developed by myself – no real team – but a lot of it was through open source.4:01 – What was the motivation? Why music; why not a drawing library like something visual?4:19 – Sam: Many years ago I had a tragedy in the family. I was struggling mentally with it. One thing that helped me was I picked up a book on a specific language.When I see these visual systems...it can be very daunting and difficult. To me when I use programming tools I thought naturally music.6:14 – Can you talk about the architecture of https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/graphs/contributors?6:50 – Guest: https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/graphs/contributors came purely from response and had a small amount of money to spend – teaching kids how to code. I wanted to get this overtone.I used to be a Ruby programmer. The original core was taken from these overtones. And the way it works is that you have a simple server, Ruby server, and...Three separate processes all talking over the network.9:08 – I want to give the listeners an idea of what this sounds like – it’s pretty amazing.Here is a sound that is 4 lines of code in Ruby. Can you tell us what is going in to make that sound work?9:37 – Sam: The bottom layer is...the different waveforms for that sound clip. There is a mathematician who figured out...Sam talks about how sound works and how Sonic Pi works. 12:24 – Sam: The way to record a sound and the way to...12:35 – Acid Walk – let’s take a listen.12:50 – That is purely very intricate – that was about 60-80 lines.13:00 –Sam: The bass line was...and the ticking sound was how long to wait again. It sounds complicated but take notes from a scale (different color palettes of notes) – notes you pick from. It will create the melody randomly for you. Adding some distortions and reverbs, etc.14:03 – I am not musically inclined. So when I think of Raspberry Pi – why did you choose Ruby and not Python for developing the Sonic Pi engine?14:27 – Sam: Your statement – “You are not musically inclined,” bothers me. We can all wave our arms around and dance. Having that mind thought is a barrier to your well-being. There was an interview with a lady over 100 years old. Any regrets? When I was 80 – I could have been playing for 20 years!15:43 – Sam: My contract was about to expire and then was the same year that Raspberry Pi released and had staggering success. They didn’t necessarily have...Every week I went into the classroom with a different version.Actually there are different pros and cons in an educational context.19:00 – Looking at the Sonic Pi in https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ but also some https://www.erlang.org in there?19:15 – Sam: I talked earlier about the three components. Sam talks in-detail about Ruby and why he also used some https://www.erlang.org. 22:30 – Sam: https://www.erlang.org has a beautiful design and there is no garbage collector. It was the right architecture. I thought – how am I going to sit down and learn Erlang? Well you just make friends. Another program we used that takes these messages and...23:40 – Have you had any requests to make this an ONLINE application?23:50 – Sam: I have been thinking about this for some time. The web audio isn’t super solid. You would have to have a really decent invitation in web audio that is rock solid. The music applications still don’t use the web because it isn’t there quite, yet.25:35 – Advertisement – https://devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job/ 26:16 – Can you talk about the inspiration to the DSL that you are using on Sonic Pi? Why create your own DSL?26:31 – Sam: Sure! Your syntax is a data structure, which...28:28 – You have been using this since 2013?28:41 – Sam: Yes I do the majority of the work. It is an open source project and a core team of developers who are the core contributors. People own their work that they have done. It’s a powerful team. There are visual contributions among many different ways. I have done the crappy jobs.29:51 – You have put so much time into this? Are you getting paid for this?30:05 – Sam: I am extremely fortunate to be getting paid for this. It’s being funded by various sources. These people allowed me the freedom to create Sonic Pi the way that I wanted to build it. The Pi Top they provided some funding, among other donors and such. I have a patron page that is growing. I am doing more keynotes and conferences. This was designed to help students learn how to code. I do look for contributors. The language is there but we need the tools.32:46 – I run a company called CodeFund to bring money to open source. There are different ways that people can generate funds for projects. There are organizations that are helping us to make our projects sustainable.33:22 – Sam comments.Sam: I am trying to find ways to be sustainable, so I can be comfortable.33:53 – Where can people go to donate?34:02 – Go to SonicPi.net. Don’t donate if you don’t like it. If it makes you smile then please donate. You can join and donate.34:43 – Sam: When you have funding it can be removed in one sweep.35:19 – You have an https://in-thread.sonic-pi.net?35:20 – Yes! Programming music communities are great. Yes, we have musicians in there and coders in there.36:33 – People can post their music – they aren’t posting music they are posting code.36:47 – Sam: Yes! If you can represent your music in some weird syntax, that can be stored somewhere like dots and lines (like Western music notation) then that’s great.It’s not just what the trumpet and the violin should play but what studio effects we should add. Even if you are using multiple threads those tings are always resolved. I can take my new code and hear the exact same things that I’ve heard. When you go to see performances and see live coding performance.39:50 – Panelist comments.What does the future look like for Sonic Pi?40:02 – Sam: It’s a business problem more than a technical problem. I am working on accessibility. I am making sure that this and that works well, and navigation to work with. Also, collaboration, too; the ability to share and contribute their compositions in one place. Can we get children from Africa to write pieces with children from Finland?41:57 – Anything else that we should know about Sonic Pi?42:08 – Sam: It really depends. What’s important to realize that this whole coding /music thing is a really new thing. When you see a guitar it’s had thousands of years to evolve. What we have right now is really exciting. We should see this as new musical instruments. Its’ really tough to hear people say, “code cannot make music.” Also, not to have any pre-conceived ideas, and to share their work with others. We aren’t professional musicians and just to explore, experiment, and play. People might be too reluctant to share because they are comparing it to music that they adore.44:56 – Panelist: https://gist.github.com/xavriley/87ef7548039d1ee301bb 46:12 – Intro and outro for podcasts.46:37 – How can we find these?46:42 – Sam: I tweet these. A few years ago I got into Rolling Stone magazine. Download an opera and download a rock song.48:49 – https://www.freshbooks.com Links:
- https://devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job/
- https://www.erlang.org
- https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/
- http://www.rubymotion.com
- https://rubyonrails.org
- https://sonic-pi.net
- https://github.com/samaaron/sonic-pi/graphs/contributors
-
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.54 min - MRS 064: Nathan Kontny
Panel: Charles Max Wood
Guest: Nathan Kontny
This week on My Ruby Story, the panel talks with Nathan Kontny who has been in the Ruby community since 2005. He once was a chemical engineer, and then got into programming after a broken ankle incident; after that...the rest is history! Today, Nathan and Chuck talk about Ruby, how to begin a startup company, Rockstar Coders, balancing life, and much more!
In particular, we dive pretty deep on:
1:05 – Chuck: E365 is the past episode you’ve been featured on.
1:14 – Nathan comments.
1:20 – Chuck.
1:56 – Nathan: Been in the community since 2005. I am a developer and entrepreneur. I do a lot of YouTube and videos nowadays.
2:50 – Chuck: How did you get into this field?
2:55 – Guest: It’s weird. I was a chemical engineer in the past. Back in the day 1996 I was learning...
My love for it started through an internship. It was kind of a scary place dealing with harmful materials. Make sure you aren’t carrying uranium with you, and wear multiple gas masks at all times. There was an acid leak through someone’s shoulder. I didn’t love it, but something fortunate happened. I broke my ankle in one summer, and when I showed-up they made me go to this trail where I couldn’t be near the chemicals. Well, the director had computer problems and asked him to help with him. I put in code and out came results. In the chemical industry it was/is: “Maybe the chemicals will react to this chemical in this way...?” It was this dopamine rush for me. After that summer, I wanted to do programming.
7:16 – Chuck: Same thing for me. This will manifest and then boom. I had a friend change to computer major – and this led me to the field.
8:45 – Guest: Yeah, I had a different career shown to me and then I had a choice.
9:02 – Chuck: How did you find Ruby?
9:05 – Guest: I got a job but they wouldn’t let me program because I didn’t have enough experience. I had to teach myself. I taught myself Java – 9 CDs back in the day. I stayed up late, and did anything I could to teach myself. I taught myself Java. I got promoted in the business and became a Java developer. After 5 years of that I started doing freelance work.
I love Ruby’s language and how simple it was to me. I have flirted with other languages, but I keep coming back to Ruby.
13:00 – Chuck: The same for me, too. Oh, and this makes this so much easier, and it extends so much easier. I have questions about being an entrepreneur. Anyways, you get into Ruby and Rails, you’ve done a bunch of things. What are you proud of and/or interested in with Rails? How do you feel like Rails helps with building things?
14:00 – Guest shares his past projects.
I was proud of just hosting Rails, because there were so many changes back in the day. I have helped with open source contributions back in 2009. There was a security problem and I discovered this. Nothing happened and I just went in and fixed the bug; an infamous contribution. I am proud of my performance work. I made a plug-in for that, etc. Also, work with Highrise.
17:23 – Chuck: Yep, Highrise people will know. I’ve used Highrise in the past.
17:38 – Nathan: Yeah.
17:50 – Chuck and Nathan go back and forth.
17:58 – Chuck: You’ve done all these different things. So for a start-up what advice would you give? People are doing their own thing – what’s your advice on an incubator, or doing it alone or raising capitol?
18:41 – Nathan: I take a middle road approach. You do what makes sense with your business. What works for you? I would do that. It’s hard to pick-on what incubators could be.
Ownership is everything – once you don’t own it – you loose that control. Don’t loose your equity. I wanted more control over my box. I would be careful raising money – do that as a last effort. Keep your ownership as far as you can. But if you are up against the wall – then go there.
22:29 – Chuck: Now I have 2 jobs: podcasting and developing this course. I guess my issue is how do you find the balance there between your fulltime job and your new fulltime job?
23:01 – Nathan: Yeah it’s tough. I do, too, now I am building something and trying to balance between that and Rockstar Coders. Clients have meetings and there are fires. There is no magic to it. I thought bunching your days into clusters would help me with focus, but it’s not good for the business. I don’t think the batch thing isn’t working for me. A little bit on, a little bit off. I think MT on Rockstar. Wednesday I take a half-day. Thursday all start-up, etc. It’s just balance. It can’t be lopsided one way or the other. Just living with my girlfriend and now wife was easy, but having a kid in the evening is tricky. I create nice walls that don’t interfere. I don’t know that’s it.
25:55 – Chuck: It sounds like they are completely separate. What I am building affects my people at work. I find the balance hard, too.
26:21 – Nathan: It’s also good to have partners who support you.
27:19 – Chuck: Do you start looking for help with marketing, or...?
27:27 – Nathan: Yeah that’s hard, too. Maybe? Some people aren’t in the US and they might be more affordable. My friend found someone in Europe who is awesome and their fees are cheaper. Their cost of living is cheaper than the U.S. There are talented folks out there.
28:50 – Chuck: Yeah, I had help with a guy from Argentina. I am in Utah and he was an hour ahead. So scheduling was easy.
29:27 – Nathan: I have a hard time giving that up, too. It’s hard to hire someone through startup work. Startup work needs to be done quickly, etc. BUT when things solidify then get help.
30:28 – Chuck: They see it as risky proposition. It seems like the cost is getting better so the risk is there.
30:48 – Nathan: There is tons of stops and goes if I look back into my career. In the moment they feel like failures, but really it was just a stepping-stone. It was just a source for good ideas, and writings, and things to talk at podcasters about, etc. I just feel like short-term they feel risky but in the long-term you can really squeeze out value from it. I am having trouble, right now, finding customers, it could be risky, and there might not be a market for this. But I am learning about x, y, and z. Everything is a stepping-stone for me now. I don’t feel like it’s a failure anymore to me.
32:50 – Chuck: What are you doing now?
32:55 – Guest: Rockstar.
3 / 4 teenagers want to be YouTubers! That’s just crazy and that will keep going. I want to be apart of that. I am making programs so people can make their own videos. That’s what I am fooling around with now.
35:06 – Chuck: Yeah we will have a channel. There is album art. I’m working on it. I will start recording this week.
35:43 – Nathan: It is hard to get traction there. I don’t know why? Maybe video watchers need quicker transitions to keep interested.
36:12 – Chuck: I could supply some theories but I don’t know. I think with YouTube you actually have to watch it. Podcasts are gaining traction because you can go wherever with it.
36:51 – Nathan: Right now commuting can only be an auditory experience. When we get self-driving cars then videos will take off.
37:14 – Chuck: Picks!
37:19 – Advertisement!
Links:
- Ruby
- Elixir
- Rails
- Highrise
- Rockstar Coders
- Nathan’s Medium
- Nathan’s Twitter
- Nathan’s LinkedIn
- Nathan’s YouTube
- Past Episode with Nathan – DevChat.TV
Sponsors:
- Code Badges
- Get a Coder Job
- Cache Fly
Picks:
Charles
- Board Games: Bubble Talk
- Shadow Hunters
- Apples to Apples
- The Resistance
- Airbnb
- Zion National Park
Nathan
- Writing is important.
- Masterclass!
- Book: Living with a Seal
- Book: Living with the Monks
- Sara Blakely – Spanx
48 min - RR 383: “Rbspy: A New(ish) Ruby Profiler!” with Julia EvansPanel:
- https://twitter.com/cmaxw?lang=en
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/kobaltz
- David Richards
Special Guests: Julia EvansIn this episode of Ruby Rogues, the panel talks with Julia Evans who is a software engineer at Stripe and lives in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The panel talks with Julia about her tool Ruby Spy among other topics. Check it out!Show Topics:1:34 – Julia gives her background.1:52 – Chuck: You’ve been on the show before. Listeners, go check it out!2:30 – What is Ruby Spy?2:09 – Julia: I wanted to know WHY my computer was doing what it was doing. I felt that it was my right, so I wrote that program.3:20 – Julia: This does have these profiling tools in Java. I thought it was unfair that Java had better tools than Ruby. I figured Ruby should have it, too.3:44 – Chuck talks about tools and Ruby Spy.4:05 – Julia recommends it.Julia: You had to install the gem in order to use it.4:30 – Chuck: some people say that it has affected their performance.4:42 – Julia: Ruby Spy is a separate process.Julia continues this conversation and goes in-depth of what Ruby Spy is, etc.5:27 – When would you use something like this, and what kind of data would get you back to debug the slow points.5:43 – Julia: When you run Ruby Spy it will...6:20 – Chuck: Does it give you method names?6:25 – Julia: Yes, 20% in this method or...6:37 – I can see how that would be helpful on certain aspects. Being able to narrow down the 1,000 methods where you cab get your biggest bang for your buck.7:05 – Julia comments.7:35 – Chuck: I know people pay for Relic...7:56 – Chuck: When it tells you which method is taking a long time, will it look at the stack and THIS method is insufficient b/c this other method is insufficient? How does it do that?8:35 – Julia answers the questions.8:58 – Chuck: I’d imagine that it could keep anything in memory. Did you have to do a bunch of work where THAT means THAT?9:20 – Julia answers.Julia: The differences weren’t that big between the different versions.9:54 – Julia goes through the different ways the versions are different.11:56 – Panelist asks a question.Is this meant for Ruby Scripts?12:10 – Julia: It doesn’t care – as long as you are using the Ruby Interpreter.12:25 – Chuck: Sometimes my performance issues is Ruby, and sometimes it’s the database. For Ruby it will sit there and wait for IO. Is that a blind spot that you will have in Ruby Spy?12:54 – Julia: Great question. There are 2 ways to do profiling.Julia explains these two ways. 13:54 – Wall Clock Time.14:04 – Chuck: Your computer has a speed and however long it takes to run one cycle. It is similar, but...14:26 – I guess as long as it’s relative – I was looking at these graphs you wrote.14:51 – Julia.14:56 – Panelist: That has been my issue. Changing context into a profiler...15:27 – Julia.15:38 – Chuck: Do you have to run it through something...?15:49 – Julia.15:53 – Chuck: Is that the most effective way to look at the data through Ruby Spy?16:07 – Julia: I twill show you the output as it is profiling. 2 visualizations: flame graph and...16:45 – Chuck.16:49 – Julia: It is the only visualization that I know of.17:00 – Chuck: I don’t know.17:05 – Julia: You have spent this amount of % to...How much time was spent in this function or that function?I feel that the flame graph is much more helpful than a list of percentages.17:33 – Chuck: What are you looking at in the flame graph?17:37 – Guest: Basically what time was spent in that function. You look at what is big, and then you figure out if that is something to optimize or not. You go to the docs and...18:36 – Jackal.18:40 – Main problem that I would run into is the information OVERLOAD.Now you have the action controllers and all these other components that aren’t normally visual.Panelist asks a question to Julia.19:29 – Julia: It does give you everything. If you have a real serious problem often the answer will really jump out at you. What I would say – if something is really slow it is right there.20:08 – Chuck: You will see the name of the method?20:15 – Chuck: Any other information it will give you?20:22 – Julia: The line number.20:28 – Chuck asks another question.20:41 – Chuck: Success stories?20:45 – Julia: Yes, I do. GitHub – success stories.Julia gives us one of her success stories. This user said that it helped them by 30%.21:28 – I can’t imagine using a Rail app that is over 10 years old. So much as changed! A lot of the documentation would be harder to find.22:00 – Julia gives another example of a success story.22:10 – When it goes to production – my brain turns off and get jittery. Figure out what happens in production and I wouldn’t want to guess for an app that couldn’t be down. This is what is happening right here and right now.22:46 – Chuck: How do they get it out into production...22:57 – Julia: Through GitHub that you can download. If you are on a Mac and your developing you can do it through Home Brew.23:17 – Chuck and Julia go back and forth.23:27 – Panelist: You don’t need to have it all the time, but a good tool.23:44 – Julia: I want people to use it but not all the time; only when they need it.23:58 – Panelist: I think on a lot of these scripts...Rails Panel – Panelist mentions this. 25:02 – Panelist asks her a question.25:12 – Pie Spy is something else that someone wrote.25:28 – Julia: Ruby Spy came first, and Pie Spy is inspired Ruby Spy. He did a good job building that.25:50 – Advertisement – Code Badges26:35 – People still use PHP?26:42 – Julia: Yep!26:47 – Chuck talks about his neighbor and how he raves about this feature or that feature.27:07 – In PHP’s defense it has come a long way. I think they are at version 7 or version 8. Sounds like they did a lot of new things with the language.27:31 – Julia: Instead of that or this language is better – what TOOLS can we use? I hear Ruby users make fun of Java, but Java has great tools. What can we learn from that language rather than bashing the other languages?28:13 – Chuck chimes-in.Dot.net.28:58 – Chuck: Let’s talk about that with the opensource.29:09 – Julia talks about the opensource project.30:30 – Julia: I asked my manager at Stripe to do this sabbatical in advance. I worked on it for 3 months. I got a check from Segment.31:05 – Panelist adds in his comments and asks a question.31:26 – Julia never used it.31:32 – I have done a lot with Ruby Motion in the past. I am curious how that would work with Ruby Spy?32:18 – IOS is pretty locked down, so I don’t think that would fly.32:36 – Chuck talks about Ruby Motion and how he thinks Ruby Spy would / wouldn’t fit.32:56 – What is funny about that, Chuck, is that you can ALT click...34:07 – Chuck mentions another app.34:17 – Julia.34:40 – Chuck.35:03 – Chuck: What else are you doing with Ruby Spy that is new?35:05 – Julia: Not much.It’s fun to see people come in to make contributions.35:33 – Panelist: Here is a suggestion, some kind of web server that you could...35:57 – Great idea.36:04 – Chuck: It wouldn’t be hard to embed it.36:12 – Julia: Sharing it between...so we don’t have to build the same thing twice.36:33 – Chuck and Julia go back-and-forth about Ruby Spy and Pie Spy,37:23 – Julia: Pearl was my first language, and I still love it.37:32 – Chuck: I guess I can’t knock it because I really haven’t tried it.37:48 – Ruby was inspired by Pearl so there’s that.37:57 – Chuck: How do people start using your tool? What is your advice?38:01 – Julia: Yeah just try it and see. Install it through Home Brew if you have a Mac.38:25 – Chuck: Picks!38:32 – Advertisement – Get a Coder Job.39:07 – Picks!Links:
- https://devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job/
- http://www.rubymotion.com
- https://rubyonrails.org
- https://github.com/tmm1/stackprof
- https://rbspy.github.io
- https://github.com/dejan/rails_panel
- https://twitter.com/b0rk
- https://jvns.ca
- https://github.com/jvns
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/jvans/?originalSubdomain=ca
Sponsors:
- https://sentry.io/welcome/
- https://www.digitalocean.com/
- https://devchat.tv/get-a-coder-job/
Picks:Dave
- https://www.amazon.com/Larin-RBV-5-5-Multi-Function-Vise/dp/B00EQ4ZUYW
- https://www.hisense-usa.com/appliances/refrigerators-freezers/fe703
Charles
- https://phoenixframework.org/
- https://vuejs.org/
- https://devchat.tv/views-on-vue/
- Side Projects
-
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.50 min - MRS 063: Victor Shepelev
Panel: Charles Max Wood
Guest: Victor Shepelev
This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks with Victor Shepelev who is a Ruby programmer and also a poet. He works for Verbit.ai and lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. Chuck and Victor talk about his background, how Victor got into Ruby, and his latest projects.
In particular, we dive pretty deep on:
1:13 – Chuck: Episode 367 – check it out!
1:37 – Background?
1:42 – Living in Ukraine.
2:08 – Chuck: How did you get into programming?
2:18 – Victor: I broke my leg and very bored. In ‘85-‘86 and I was gaming. Since then I got into programming and have been in it for 20 years.
3:20 – Chuck: Prince of Persia.
3:26 – Chuck: What made you stick with programming?
3:34 – Victor: I think it was magically and exotic. It still fascinates me.
4:03 – Chuck: How did you get into Ruby?
4:15 – Victor: There are great several programming attitudes – but I belong to the one that just write texts that expose the meanings. I like the text. I am a poet. When I write in Ruby (not like poetry), I write texts and that is what I’m thinking about. I loved C-Plus, Plus in the early 2000’s. For me it wasn’t fully expressive enough. I tried other things and searched other options. I met Ruby and it was love at the first sight.
7:09 – Chuck: What have you done with Ruby that you are proud of?
7:18 – Victor: The project takes my time is data integrated into itself: countries, planets, famous paintings, and so on. It’s really cool.
9:49 – Chuck: Where can you find this project?
9:54: Victor – GitHub and some conferences.
10:27 – Chuck: You mentioned being in a company that does translation?
10:33 – Victor: Yes. It is written in Python.
11:11 – Chuck: What are you working on now?
11:18 – Victor: Yes, this project and last year I got into development of Ruby itself. I wasn’t that proficient. I am not contributing to the language itself but creating documentation (program language reference) and new features of Ruby.
12:40 – Chuck: What is the Ruby community like in Ukraine?
12:46 – Victor: It is pretty large. Don’t know if it is large to U.S. standards.
Meetups happens every once to twice a month in my city.
Recent years it has gotten smaller, because I don’t know if they are going to the new “hip” technology.
14:16 – Chuck: We’d have Meetups like 30-40-50 people and now it’s only 10-20.
Different companies are moving to different things that they need.
14:43 – Victor: In Ukraine I think a lot of people are doing a lot of opensource. I think it will still grow to some extent.
15:29 – Chuck: It’s not that Ruby is dying per se. Ruby hit a stride when web was hot. Now we are seeing growth in AI or IOT. For example people are reaching to Python for the mathematics and scientific side to it.
16:17 – Victor adds in his comments.
Victor: I had some high hopes for Rails.
18:14 – Chuck comments.
Chuck: It would be interesting to see bindings. See these other options come forward.
18:39 – Victor.
19:10 – Chuck: Picks!
19:14 – Advertisement.
Links:
- Ruby
- Elixir
- Episode 367 – check it out!
- Victor’s GitHub
- Victor – Zverok with Ruby
- Victor’s Facebook
- Victor’s Talk on Tech Talk – The Functional Style in Ruby
- The Ruby Reference
- Book: Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan
- Book: Words for War
- New Poems from Ukraine
Sponsors:
- Code Badges
- Get a Coder Job
- Cache Fly
Picks:
Charles
- Elixir Mix – check-out future Episodes
- Game – Play Bloons Tower Defense 6
Victor
- The Ruby Reference
- Book: Voroshilovgrad by Serhiy Zhadan
- Book: Words for War
- New Poems from Ukraine
25 min - RR 382: "When to Build... When to Buy" with The PanelistsPanel:
- Charles Max Wood
- Dave Kimura
- Eric Berry
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.1 hr 4 min - MRS 062: Neil Brown
Panel: Charles Max Wood
Guest: Dr. Neil Brown
This week on My Ruby Story, Charles talks with Dr. Neil Brown who is a researcher. He helps people teach “how to program” more effectively and efficiently. Check out his social media pages and his research via the web. Chuck and Neil talk about his research among other topics.
In particular, we dive pretty deep on:
0:52 – Chuck: We are talking with Neil Brown.
1:05 – Chuck: I’ve always wanted to go to London! Let’s dive in and talk about you and how you got into all of this stuff.
1:40 – Neil: I was in primary/elementary school and sometime there I went to my dad and I asked him how are these games made? He gave me a book.
3:12 – Chuck: What are some things that you are researching?
3:24 – Neil answers the question.
5:24 – Chuck: How do you know what to look into and how do you test your hypotheses? There is some science there.
5:45 – Neil: We have a large data collection.
6:07 – Chuck: You have your own ideas linked to Java?
6:15 – Neil: Yep.
6:20 – Chuck: Do people know that they are test subjects?
6:31 – Neil: Oh yeah.
6:39 – Chuck comments.
6:45 – Chuck: What do programmers see?
6:55 – Neil: It is interesting to see the code that they are writing. You are not sure what they are trying to do. Programming is a very frustrating experience for most people. I want to reach back in time and tell them that the problem is there. You watch people do it and they kind of in the right area, and then they go somewhere else. It’s frustrating for beginners.
8:06 – Chuck: How long have you been doing the research?
8:05 – Neil: Five Years.
8:22 – Chuck: How would I get into something like that?
8:32 – Neil answers the question.
9:35 – Chuck: What are you most proud of?
9:42 – Neil answers the question.
11:34 – How do you communicate that to people in the “real world” in a professional setting?
11:45 – Neil answers the question.
Neil: Be careful of your own expectations.
12:32 – Chuck: What are you doing now?
12:35 – Neil answers the question.
12:58 – Neil: Research is focused on the “new.” Making something “new.” We are doing essential work, but work that doesn’t get a lot of recognition.
13:37 – Chuck: That’s interesting. What else should we dive into? I would love to have you back.
13:57 – Chuck: Any advice for someone who wants to get into this area?
14:00 – Neil: Study and get a Ph.D. to help you with research.
14:40 – Chuck: There are a lot of universities who do this type of research?
14:52 – Neil answers the question.
15:35 – Picks!
15:41 – Advertisement
Links:
- Ruby
- Elixir
- Dr. Neil Brown – Podcast
- Dr. Neil Brown – Article
- Dr. Neil Brown – Twitter
- Tips for Teaching Programming with Dr. Neil Brown
- BlueJ
Sponsors:
- Code Badges
- Get a Coder Job
- Cache Fly
Picks:
Charles
- Audible
- If you are exhausted / depressed / down...go and take some time for yourself!
- Having a side project
- Book: Crucial Conversations
Neil
- Michael Lewis – Flash Boys
23 min - RR 381: “Ruby GUI Development” with Saverio MiroddiPanel:
- Charles Max Wood
- Dave Kimura
- Eric Berry
- Get a Coder Job Course
- Ruby
- Shoes
- Saverio Miroddi’s GitHub
- Saverio Miroddi’s article, “Using scripts in any language for...”
- Saverio Miroddi’s article, “An overview of Desktop Ruby GUI Development in 2018”
- RhoMobile
- Ruby Motion
- Ruby Gems
- Hackety Hack
- NPM – Nativefier
- Sentry
- Digital Ocean
- Get a Coder Job Course
- Books – I have been devouring stuff on Audible.
- Personal growth tape – The Queen’s Poisoner by Wheeler
- A View from the Top by Zig Ziglar
- Code Badges
- Command strips – 3M
- NPM – Nativefier
- 2 courses, plus a 3rd!
- How to write an open source
- How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub
- The beginners guide to React
- Free courses on Egghead
- Movie: The Founder
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ruby-rogues--6102073/support.40 min
About Ruby Rogues
From the publisher's feed
Our original panel podcast, Ruby Rogues is a weekly discussion around Ruby, Rails, software development, and the community around Ruby.
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