Profile avatar
russolsen.bsky.social
Engineer, reader, believer in numbers, author of Eloquent Ruby, Getting Clojure, Design Patterns in Ruby. He, him
147 posts 869 followers 541 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
Posts 18 Comments 32

Here's the first of what promises to be an erratic series of updates on the progress of the 2nd edition of #EloquentRuby: So far, @baweaver.bsky.social and I have gotten most of the infrastructure up and running and have been through roughly 10% of the book.

submitted 18 days ago • 1 comment

Anybody remember what it was like to use subversion? No? Well good for you!

submitted 18 days ago • 3 comments

I find that this is a somewhat unpopular opinion but I think that your testing frameworks should be the simplest bit of kit in your toolbox. We all want powerful testing tools. But there is nothing worse than discovering that the fault lies not in your code but in your testing tool.

submitted 40 days ago • 1 comment

I think every developer has experienced that moment when the answer to the question "What idiot wrote this?" is "Oh, me." It's different when you experience that with prose you wrote a decade ago. The difference is that there are many more bad words in both the question and the answer.

submitted 43 days ago • 0 comments

Eloquent Ruby 2nd Edition is on the way with Pragmatic Programmers! @russolsen.bsky.social and I have started work on modernizing this Ruby classic for the next generation of Rubyists to enjoy.

submitted 54 days ago • 3 comments

You know you are a developer when you look at your phone at exactly 4:04 PM and your immediate reaction is "WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS THING??!!"

submitted 54 days ago • 0 comments

I'm thrilled to announce that @baweaver.bsky.social and I have just kicked off work on a second edition of Eloquent Ruby, to be published by our friends at @pragprog.com. The idea is to keep the basic structure of the book the same while updating it to Ruby as it is used today.

submitted 54 days ago • 2 comments

I'm convinced we would have interstellar travel, flying cars and the worldwide availability of decent soft pretzels if only we could decide on the exchange rate between tabs and spaces.

submitted 56 days ago • 1 comment

So as something of a technological save-dwelling vim/gdb based programmer I have always been averse to IDEs like Visual Studio Code. But I have to say, as a tool for writing prose (markdown, asciidoc, etc) VSC is brilliant.

submitted 60 days ago • 1 comment

That moment at the end of a long, productive day when you realize that you are so tired that the progress you are doing is being exactly canceled out by the damage you are inflicting. It is the point of zero entropy and it's all downhill from here. Solution: Post about it on bluesky.

submitted 60 days ago • 0 comments

So I have to access an old system. I need a client for the system. Oh good, there it is all packaged up, ready to install. Current status: Package manager is downloading the Internet.

submitted 63 days ago • 1 comment

Just started using JellyFin for my media server. It is great. Aside from working well it reminded me of how much branding and promotional nonsense we have to put up with on most any commercial product. In contrast Jellyfin has a splash screen and then Just. Gets. On. With. It. jellyfin.org

submitted 67 days ago • 1 comment

I would like to say a few words about the management style of The Grinch. Yes he has gotten a lot of bad press. But consider: 1 He made a decision 2 Got right to implementing it 3 Wasn't afraid to admit he was wrong How many managers have you come across that are incapable of any of those?

submitted 72 days ago • 1 comment

So my lovely significant other took a bad spill while we were out walking in a park over the weekend. Fortunately one trip to the ER later she is OK. I only mention this here because while we were waiting for the ambulance, every single passer-by stopped and offered to help. Every one.

submitted 81 days ago • 1 comment

In my Un/Linux adventures I've gone thru about 1M "navigate around the filesystem" utils. What I've ended up with is a set of bash functions that lets me give a quick name to a dir and then get back to it: $ cd /some/place $ here project44 # save this dir $ . $ there project44 # get back there

submitted 85 days ago • 3 comments

I've been putting together a janky so-8-years-ago PC to play some old games. Parts from ebay jammed into a Dell business computer that has no business doing any of this. The hardest part by far? Creating a bootable Windows install USB drive. Ah software.

submitted 87 days ago • 2 comments

Here's a blast from the past: I'm kicking off a new project today and so I grabbed a notebook from my pile of new notebooks. Except that it was old, one I'd used in 2007. And stuck in it were some papers, stuff that I'd written for my Tech Writing class in 1981.

submitted 89 days ago • 1 comment

I am reminded again the huge value in just letting yourself be a beginner and make mistakes. I been doing something new (designing a PCB) and I realized that I've made not 1, not 2, but at least 3 rookie mistakes. Should I feel bad? Nope. I. Will. Never. Make. Those. Mistakes. Again. Probably.

submitted 93 days ago • 1 comment