Monday, January 18, 2010
Recently Confreaks posted video from the
Lone Star Ruby Conference talk I gave in August, called Ruby for Startups.
I've refined the talk a few times since then but it's still a good representation of my current state of mind about what I've learned about Ruby and about software design while building OtherInbox.
Check it out if you'd like to see more! The slides are posted
here.
Labels: lone star ruby conference, otherinbox, rails, ruby, video
Friday, August 28, 2009
Today I gave a talk about my experiences writing the code for
OtherInbox, called Ruby for Startups. The slides are below. Hope you find them interesting!
Labels: lone star ruby conference, rails, ruby, startups
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Confreaks has posted my entire
Ruby in the Cloud talk from Lone Star Ruby Conference. Check it out and let me know what you think!
Here's a 30 second synopsis filmed by Gregg Pollack:
Labels: cloud computing, lone star ruby conference, ruby
Sunday, September 7, 2008
meeting fellow Rubyists and hanging out with the entire OtherInbox dev team. I had the privilege of speaking about all the benefits we've gained from using as much Ruby as possible in running our service. Confreaks will be posting the video soon, but here are my slides:
I really enjoyed sharing our experiences with the conference, but the highlight of the event for me was getting to hear the inventor of Ruby speak, and also getting to meet him. You will not meet a more generous, noble, joyful person than Matz, and I can't think of anyone I don't know personally who has had more of an impact on my professional life than him.
Labels: lone star ruby conference, ruby
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
I will be speaking at the
Lone Star Ruby Conference in September about how we use Ruby to deploy, monitor, and manage a cluster of servers running in the
Amazon Web Services virtual cloud. Below is a summary of what I'll be talking about.
In OtherInbox, almost every system administration task imaginable is carried out using Ruby, meaning we as developers can enjoy all of Ruby's expressive benefits and spend less time scripting the shell, writing cron tasks, or using other languages. Because we make fewer context switches from thinking in Ruby to thinking in other languages, we also reap a big productivity benefit.
Using Ruby throughout our cloud also means that porting the application to run in different production environments is a trivial task, because Ruby is the glue connecting the Ruby components together, thus all we require is a Ruby interpreter to deploy.
Two key Ruby technologies have matured in the previous 18 months which make it ideal for almost every layer of managing a cluster of servers:
- god.rb allows fine-grained process monitoring and daemon control (a la monit)
- rufus-scheduler enables Ruby-based scheduling (replacing cron, and providing a great facility for running daemons that must be executed on a recurring basis)
When combined with these Ruby workhorses, developers today can spend much more of their time writing Ruby code, and less time struggling with the vagaries of their production environment:
The talk will also include a discussion of using several different
AWS gems to make
cloud computing simple, by illustrating the use of Amazon's
S3 and
SQS services to distribute asychnronous work and handle communication between servers.
Labels: conferences, deployment, god.rb, lone star ruby conference, otherinbox, ruby
