Archive for March, 2010

Ada Lovelace Day

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

Hey it’s Ada Lovelace day. I found out about it from 2d goggles, a web comic that follows the awesome adventures of Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage.

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited.

The two women I thought of are Rear Admiral Grace Hopper and Barbara Liskov without whom computing would not be where it is today. They rock.

I use concepts they came up with every day. e.g. The Liskov Substitution Principle: If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and needs batteries, it’s probably not a duck. Or for Grace Hopper, compilers and the idea that computing machines could be used for things other than arithmetic (read calculating bomb trajectories).

Some Quotes

I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. … they carefully told me, computers could only do arithmetic; they could not do programs.

— Grace Hopper [more]

It’s much better to go for the thing that’s exciting. But the question of how you know what’s worth working on and what’s not separates someone who’s going to be really good at research and someone who’s not. There’s no prescription. It comes from your own intuition and judgment.

— Barbara Liskov [src]

Check out some of the other posts for Ada Lovelace day at findingada.com

Mountain West Ruby Conf Rocked This Year

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Mountain West Ruby Conf this year was awesome. I totally had a blast.

It was the third time I’ve gone to it. It was my first conference and still is my favorite. I got to meet Matz, I gave a lightning talk, I met all sorts of interesting people and I learned a bunch of new things. To quote Matz, MountainWest RubyConfはすばらしかった。

Matz & me

Things to revisit

  • Rack(1.1.0 in particular)
  • Chef(looks better than the last time I poked at it)

New things(to me)

  • RVM(rvm looks pretty handy, especially for cross vm library development)
  • Hubris(this might be a neat way to get into Haskell development)

My lightning talk