Note to self: don’t trust the comments

I recently decided I would write my very own web application to handle my personal finances since Google Apps Spreadsheet just isn’t cool anymore. The general idea isn’t new, in fact there are a few apps out there that can do the job, but this way I can learn some of the different tools in the Ruby world. I intended to use Ruby On Rails since I’ve gotten to know it over the past year, however then I changed my mind. I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn (otherwise it would be dumb to pick something I don’t know in favor of tools I am familiar with), and picked out Merb as a framework of choice, Sequel as the ORM and Haml to handle the views. The first thing that stroke me, was the lack of documentation, and on top of that, even the comments in Merb code were misleading. I couldn’t get Haml to handle the *.haml files. The gem was installed, and the dependency was set according to the comments in the ‘config/init.rb’ file:


# dependencies "RedCloth", "merb_helpers"
# OR
# dependency "RedCloth", "> 3.0"

It actually should have looked like this:


Merb::BootLoader.after_app_loads do
  require "merb-haml"
  require "merb_helpers"
end

Somehow I have this feeling it’s going to be a long & rough ride :-).

May 20, 2008. Tags: haml, merb, money_tracker. Ruby. No Comments.

A few words about RuPy 2008

Last weekend I visited Poznań for RuPy 2008 conference along with a good Code Sprinters representation & Piotrek Czajkowski.

The conference was held in UAM’s Collegium Mathematicum, which was pretty hard to get to. I really enjoyed the conference though, thanks to some interesting talks. I really enjoyed Zed Shaw’s talk on getting statistical results while measuring web app performance. It was interesting & funny (in spite all of Zed’s Ruby & Rails negativity :-)). I also really liked Micheal Foord’s talk on IronPython & Silverlight 2 (not to mention his lightning talk about Resolver One) since I missed it on SFI conference held in Cracow. Adam’s talk on functional programming in Python also went really good, and gathered many people in the auditorium. Unfortunately I didn’t see the PyPy talks which were said to be excellent. Overall the talks were a load of fun. There were some glitches though. First of all, in my opinion speaking in English shouldn’t be mandatory for speakers, as majority of the talks presented by Polish speakers was terrible to listen too. Because of the language barrier speakers couldn’t speak up their minds. So I think it would be best to let the speakers choose the language they speak in. There were some exceptions though for example the “A need for REST” talk by Łukasz Piestrzeniewicz. The second thing I didn’t like, was the lack of transportation from the place where the conference was held to the city centre (we had to use cab’s all the time) as the information on RuPy official site were a bit misleading.

Photos are available in the Code Sprinters Flickr Pool.

April 16, 2008. Tags: rupy2008 events trips ruby python. Photos, Python, Ruby, Trips. 4 Comments.