May 26, 2010: Answer The Question Please
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Got interviewed yesterday by Miles Forrest and Curtis McHale of the coderpath podcast. Presumably it’ll be out and public in the next couple of weeks. You’ll be the first person I tell.
Couple things
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It’s been a while since I did anything like this, and I always forget how much it’s a genuine skill to be able to give a clear answer without doing a lot of ums and ahs.
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First rule of public speaking. You are always talking faster than you think you are. Slow down.
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Miles and Curtis set it up so that you can see the questions as they are being asked, which helps a surprising amount in remembering what the heck the actual question was.
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I thought it went okay. You always wish you’d been more clever, but it was fun and I’d do it again.
Book Status
Beta 3 did get released yesterday. There may be an issue with the epub version, it’s being looked into.
And then…
New Relic did an overview of usage patterns from their users, Ruby versions, installed gems, and the like. I love this stuff. What stood out for me:
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Ruby 1.9 has a 2.7% share. Ruby 1.8.7 is only 39.5%.
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Nearly half of all Rails apps are on 2.3.5, which is an impressive amount of keeping up to date. Rails 3 beta is at 1.3%
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Assuming that there’s no overlap between the gem and the plugin, about 1/3 of Rails apps use Haml.
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Authlogic is the top authentication gem at about 20%, restful_authentication is a little lower.
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RSpec is at 7% – can that be accurate? Seems low.
Demitry Belitsky interviewed a number of Ruby community members about how they became successful Ruby developers. The list includes Ryan Bates, Yehuda Katz, Jamis Buck, and Geoffrey Grosenbach. Seems worth your time.
Speaking of Ryan Bates, he has a new challenge up at Ruby Learning. There are prizes.