The summary:

MountainWest RubyCamp 2007
Saturday, November 17th 2007
1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Salt Lake City Library
Level 4 Meeting Room

The organizers have asked that if you’re coming to put your name on the wiki page

I’ve never been to a “Camp” before but I hear they are like “unconferences”. I go to the Internet Identity Workshop which is an unconference, and the results have been fantastic. Those who come are actively involved in the discussion, it’s quite refreshing.

I don’t know if I will present or not. I could lead a discussion and get people up to speed with the digital identity landscape—OpenID, CAS, InfoCard and some secret sauce :)

If you’re interested but a little put off that it is specifically about “Ruby” you should come anyway. Ruby is a good excuse to get together and rub elbows, it’s not an excuse to exclude interesting people or ideas.

To learn about distributed version control systems (DVCS), I’ve been using bazaar on some small projects . I know these DVCSs are supposed to really shine in multi-developer environments spread out across the world but I have found that they offer an incredibly low barrier to entry for a single developer on his own box. This is the typical situation for a college student in computer science and many others as well.

An example could help here. I’m taking a networking class where a bit of code is provided in a framework and we need to use the code for our programs.

cd lab1
bzr init
bzr add
bzr checkin -m "Initial import" 

Done. This folder is now under version control.

When version control is this easy to setup and use, there’s no excuse for not using it.

Some time ago I went on a church mission to Brazil for two years. I didn’t know anything about Brazil or Portuguese. We have a Missionary Training Center where I was inundated with non-stop Portuguese lessons for two months. It moved so fast it was hard to remember everything but it was a good preparation. I went from no knowledge of Portuguese to two months later being dropped off in the small town of Maracajú, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The other missionary working with me was Brazilian leaving me three hours away from anyone who could understand me. I thought I was learning a lot in the classroom but have since found that the pace of learning doesn’t even compare to complete immersion. I don’t like to go hungry. I learned how to speak.

I’ve been in web development for a long time. Since I’m a student in computer science, I have gravitated towards making the “back-end” of web systems. At the same time I think that user experience is the most important aspect of software design. I found that even though I read a lot about it, my javascript fu was not strong enough. I could design cool, useful apps that were fully functional on the backend, but in order to code up the front I would search for javascript scripts and widgets until I found one that was similar to what I was looking for and then just tweaked it. That works for many things, but other times you can’t fall back on those tactics and must flex your own fu.

After all is said and done, more is said than done. —Aesop

Reading and talking about it aren’t enough. You’ve got to do it yourself.

I gave myself a self-imposed immersion project. I wanted something small enough that I could have some quick success (to entice myself to stick with it) but still be big enough to be interesting.

When the term Ajax first started gaining momentum Jamis Buck blogged a piece about his first Ajax app , a simple word game. The back story was that there was a technical discussion at his work about the merits of asynchronous XMLHTTPRequest versus synchronous XMLHTTPRequest. His little word game was a demonstration to his coworkers showing that asynchronous was the way to go, so that it would not lock up the browser. It was a fun little game that both me and my wife enjoyed playing now and again.

For my javascript immersion project I decided that I would try and write the entire game in javascript with no back-end at all. It was just to force myself to get out of my comfort zone.

Here it is, Devlin’s Word Reorder Game.

Some technical notes:

This is implemented using the excellent jQuery library. The tasteful effects courtesy of the Interface library. The dictionary is just all the four letter words contained in the file /usr/share/dict/words on my Mac. I know, a lot of words you think should be in there aren’t (especially the short pluralized ones like tips, huts etc.). If you can get me a better dictionary I’ll glady switch.

I used jQuery and am glad I did. It takes away a lot of pain experienced in my previous forays into javascript and browser incompatibilities.