As you may know Ruby 2.0.0 has been released. Despite the major version it is mostly an incremental release. However, it does include a few breaking changes so a major version is warranted. However, whilst the usefulness of most of the new features was obvious to me, I couldn’t say the same of Module#prepend.

However, whilst listening to the Ruby Rogues podcast on Ruby 2 one of the Rogues (I think it was Josh Susser) referred to memoization as a case where it would make a difference. Because of that I thought I would implement memoization in 1.9.3 and then in 2.0.0 using Module#prepend and see what came out of it. The process led to a personal “ah-ha” moment and so I thought I’d share what I found.

If there was one thing that I learnt in 2012 that I would want to convey to all the developers I know, it would be this:

Logging is about so much more than failures

I don’t know if it was just my experience but little to no emphasis was put on logging aside from handling exceptions. In the .NET world this boiled down to adding ELMAH to your project and then forgetting about it, with Rails it meant having nothing but the logs that you got out of the box. I’ve found that if that’s all you have, you’re really missing out.

Usually – almost always – there’s a much simpler solution waiting to be
discovered, one that doesn’t involve all the architectural noise, convolutions
of the straightforward, and misguided emphasis on hooks and options for all
kinds of tangents which might be useful someday. Discovering that solution may
not be easy, but it is time well spent.

My friend Dom “Knave of Nottingham” Finn’s wrote a post To Fix Or Not To Fix. This is something I’ve thought about quite a lot as, lets be honest, everyone is maintaining a legacy codebase to some degree.

The Boy Scout (or Girl Guide) Rule is to leave the campsite tidier than you found it. This helps avoid making the problem any worse and the propagation of Broken Windows.

Among some of the more interesting feedback were some requests for some links and an overview of the things mentioned in my talk.

A few people mentioned they felt misled by the title and synopsis of the talk. I read it back and I think it’s accurate, but then I would. If you are one of those people can you email me at garry@robustsoftware.co.uk with suggestions on how I should change it. It would be greatly appreciated.

Slides

I’ve put them up on Slideshare though without the context of the talk they might not be much use. I used the Bangers font from Google web fonts and the tech light palette from colourlovers.

Also, versioning APIs sucks. It’s not that it’s hard, it’s that once you publish
an API, you pretty much have to support it forever. This is especially true when
your API is being consumed through multiple layers. I can’t force game
developers to upgrade, because they can’t force their users to upgrade. The
lesson here is simple, if you don’t have to make something public, don’t!

An interesting article exploring the relationship between quantum physics and continuous delivery.

None of it is real until it is in the hands of actual users. I don’t mean
someone who will poke at it a bit or evaluate it. And I don’t mean a proxy who
will tell you if the users might like it. I mean someone who will use it for its
intended purpose as part of their normal routine. The experience those users
report is reality. Everything else is speculation.

Last Monday I gave my talk “Gain Trust and Create Change” for the first time at the London .NET user group. The guys at Skills Matter recorded the whole thing so you can watch it online if you missed it.

I am reasonably pleased with how the presentation went. Watching it back was an uncomfortable experience but is very useful to feed into the next time I give this talk. Speaking of which, if you run a user group and would like me to give this talk get in touch.

For those of you interested in buying the two books I mentioned during the talk, they are The Passionate Programmer and Driving Technical Change, both from The Pragmatic Programmers.

I’d like to thank everyone who turned up, Ian Cooper for giving me the opportunity and Skills Matter for hosting.

I tweeted yesterday (25th Jan 2012) to ask if anyone knew of a solution as convenient as Heroku but based in the UK or Europe.

The reason I asked was at Zopa we are thinking of migrating our front-end over to a Ruby stack and Heroku was the obvious option for hosting such a solution. However, as 95% or more of our traffic comes from the UK it doesn’t make complete sense to host our website outside of the UK or Europe at worst.

I got a lot of interest from Twitter as to whether I found anything but no suggestions of similar services based this side of the pond. At the same time I sent an email to Heroku’s support asking if they had any plans to give an UK or European hosting option.

Heroku got back to me yesterday evening and said they have no immediate plans for server resources outside the US but they are working on Safe Harbor certification if your concerns are of a more legal nature. They also confirmed that they are hosted within the US East region of AWS which is better than West for Europeans.

Their suggested strategy is to use a CDN alongside Heroku so that the majority of your assets will come from a local source and only your dynamic content will come from the US.

This probably rules out Heroku for us at Zopa as a CDN adds needless complexity for us given our traffic volumes and the fact that almost all of our traffic is from the same location. However, I thought I should knock a blog post together to share what I found.

Yesterday, I gave a presentation on Backbone.js at the inaugural DDD North. My thanks go out to Andrew Westgarth and his team for organising it, it was a great event.

I was a bit nervous as it was my first time speaking at a conference and I think it showed. I rattled through my presentation at break-neck speed, unfortunately finishing well under my allocated hour. Niall Merrigan gave me some tips for sorting that out so I’ll hopefully be more composed next time!

I’d like to thank everyone who showed up for my talk and look forward to receiving their feedback. The slides for my presentation are now up on Slideshare and the code I demonstrated is available on Github.