Panasonic Youth rob sanheim writes about software, business, ruby, music, stuff and things

Nothing to it but to do it

A guy in college I knew had a catch phrase he would say often, to the point of annoyance. Its stuck with me since then, and rings true all the time:

Nothing to it but to do it

Of course, I remember him saying this most often when embarking on a beer run, but thats […]

Symbol#to_proc and inconsistent code vs DRY

Jeremy recently wrote some good tips on cutting back on your code base, but his last tip is one I'm not sure about. It recommends using the Symbol#to_proc (in ActiveSupport, coming in ruby 1.9) shortcut for simple enumerable calls. Like many rubyists, I appreciate the elegance and DRYness of to_proc, as you [...]

Drucker on Efficiency

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
- Peter F Drucker

Adventures in PHP

Been doing a lot of PHP in anger the past two weeks. Its not the cleanest language, but you can definitely get stuff done quickly with it. I've been getting used to the Wordpress source, and lots of plugins and hacks built on top of it. Its pretty much at the oppositie [...]

Why not to use Ant

Via Projectionist:
Michael K. - I just asked a former co worker why he hasn't written an ant task to deploy their app
Michael K. - "dude - they pay me by the hour"
Michael K. - enterprise right there

Lets not go Crazy with the Social Chiclets, People

The little icons on the bottom of blog posts, not the gum.

Sql standards - how exactly did this get so f’ed up?

Lets say you want to get the first n number of rows from a result set, to do pagination or because you don't care about the rest of the rows or whatever. You would think that there would be some relatively standard way defined in sql, and then the database vendors would all try [...]

Five books every Java developer must own

Update: Welcome, Javalobby readers! You might be interested in the followup to this post. Thanks for the great feedback and suggestions.

Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David ThomasThis is absolutely required reading for any software developer, regardless of language. If you are lost when people are talking about "keeping it DRY" or [...]

Interview with DHH on ITConversation — and _On Lisp_ ebook free!

Its a anti Java bonanza!!
Cover your ipod in a flame retardant suit, because DHH has an interview (direct mp3 link) up on ITConversations entitled "Secrets Behind Ruby on Rails". If you are web 2.0 compliant, go to the odeo channel to grab it (tho it hasn't refreshed yet).
The secrets go something like this:

Create innovative [...]

Neward’s paper on the OR mismatch and LINQ

Ted Neward recently posted an extensive paper comparing various OR solutions from over the years, including JDBC, SQLJ, and ActiveRecord. Of course, the paper finished up by showing .NET's upcoming solution with LINQ and how it "hopes to take a large step forward in minimizing the object-relational mismatch." It allows you to code [...]