dan/blog

Writing at article on capistrano today, I was reminded of the quote from Larry Wall in his book on Perl Programming:

We will encourage you to develop the three great virtues of a programmer: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

I’ve just been recruiting for a new developer, and one of the tests we always give developers pretty much tests their laziness. If they resort to rebuilding everything from the Browser up, it’ll take days. If the cheat, short-cut but get the thing working then they’re lazy – and hired.

Linux Format, August 2008

Article on Amazon’s EC2 – “Elastic compute cloud”.

11am. You get an email from the head of Marketing. “Hi there – we’ve just agreed to send out our lunchtime bulletin to our partner’s 2,000,000 customers. I said that this would be fine and they can all expect it in an hour or so. Let me know when it’s done. Thanks.”

Cloud Computing promises to bring bug computer fun to the masses. In the article, published today I show how easily you can get started with EC2.

Obscure though this post is, it has to be one of the things I love most about JavaScript and Ruby.

Anonymous functions in JavaScript are like:

doSomething(param1, param2, function() { ... });

In Ruby, they’re:

doSomething param1, param2, { in here }

Rake and capistrano exploit this to define tasks:

task :example do 
 ...do stuff in here...
end

Because this is just a function call to the ‘task’ function in Rake, you can wrap it in conditions and all many of stuff.