Avdi Grimm

'Virtuos Code' by Software Craftsman and 'Ruby Rogues Podcast panelist' Avdi Grim is well worth reading. He's recently been learning new languages (currently SmallTalk) and does great writeups of new insights he's having and how others can apply these insights too. http://devblog.avdi.org

Yes, actually, this is good feedback: I can see how it might have been understood as some amazing engineering. Certainly Holden did a fantastic job getting back in one piece... I've reached the stage in my programmer's career where I look back on stuff in horror: architecture astronautical sins, foolish arrogance, too much complexity... Although for good programmers, hubris might be a virtue: https://avdi.codes/the-three-virtues/

Related: http://xahlee.info/python/quality_docs.html | http://xahlee.info/comp/which_programing_language_has_best_doc.html It's curious, despite not a example of a great language, PHP has great documentation. I tried Pharo, and a great functionality there I miss in other languages, is the search by example ability. Saves a lot of visits to stackoverflow. See for example: https://avdi.codes/in-which-i-make-you-hate-ruby-in-7-minutes/

Answering my own question here, but I'd still love to see anyone else's suggestions! This seems like a good compilation: http://devblog.avdi.org/2013/06/21/a-list-of-programming-screencast-se…

My question too. Given that I can get a list of open source projects that I can work on for free with GitHub Explore[1] I am wondering what this provides me that is worth any money, not specifically $30. To take it one step further, why should I pay you for a list of free projects, when I can get paid to work on projects with other sites like Rent A Coder[2]? The list of features implies that I will effectively only get screencasts that I don't get from github repositories and depending on your language there are lots of places to get those too (ex [3]). Don't get me wrong, I am all for monetizing, but I greedily want something if I am going to pay for it. [1] https://github.com/explore [2] http://www.rent-acoder.com/ [3] http://devblog.avdi.org/2013/06/21/a-list-of-programming-screencast-se… EDIT: formatting

BTW, enko is referring to Part 2: http://globaldev.co.uk/2013/09/ruby-tips-part-2/ And I agree...I've been programming in Ruby for awhile and only lately had learned about the `Array()` conversion, which I learned through Avdi Grimm's "Confident Ruby" book (he blogged about Array several years ago: http://devblog.avdi.org/2009/10/21/array-ifying-values/). Such a small thing, but as you note, can greatly impact the cruft in your error-checking interfaces.

I started following along with Avdi Grimm as he rebooted his .emacs a while back, and it has been tremendously worthwhile. I am very glad I adopted his technique of splitting up my .emacs into multiple smaller files, and using packages in emacs24 has cleaned up things even further. http://devblog.avdi.org/category/emacs-reboot/

Exceptional Ruby is indeed fantastic. If you like it, you may be interested in Avdi's current book project "Confident Ruby": http://devblog.avdi.org/2012/06/05/confident-ruby-beta/

Avdi Grimm responded [0] to this (relatively old) article with what I think is a salient point: traditional design patterns are good, but Java makes expressing these design patterns very obtuse and heavy-handed. Nick Kallen conflates using intelligent design patterns with calling out every use of said design patterns in bold-face. Writing Java feels like "now I'm going to make a Factory Factory! See, it says FactoryFactory right there in the class name!" It's entirely natural to use intelligent design patterns in other languages than Java - so natural, in fact, that you don't have to invoke said patterns by name to use them! [0] : http://avdi.org/devblog/2010/02/09/everything-you-love-about-java-is-e…

Hi HN. If you get some value out of these slides, great! But please, do me a favor: don't try too hard to construct a narrative from a stack of slides which: a) represent about 15% of the actual semantic content of the presentation; and b) are shaped by the consideration that there's a limit to how much code you can put on a slide and have it still be readable. A lot of this material has been covered in more detail on my blog (http://avdi.org/devblog) For instance, I wrote a whole article about Maybe, NullObject, and the limits of the ability to make objects falsy here: http://avdi.org/devblog/2011/05/30/null-objects-and-falsiness/

Everything by Avdi http://devblog.avdi.org/

I run http://letscodejavascript.com, which is a screencast for professional JavaScript developers. It's not exactly a SaaS, but as a subscription business, it runs on the same fundamentals: rate of acquisition, churn, customer lifetime value, cost of acquisition, etc. We have X00 subscribers and gross low six figures. The show is bootstrapped and profitable, but not yet enough of a success to allow me to hire additional employees. I launched five months ago, at the beginning of February. > When did people start paying for your SaaS? I launched on Kickstarter, so in a sense, people started paying right away. There were two pivotal moments in the Kickstarter: First, I got a nice bump from posting it here on HN[1]. Second, I sent announcements out to a bunch of JavaScript blogs and newsletters. The only one that posted about it was JavaScript Weekly, but that led to a lot of people backing the project, and that led to an additional surge of publicity and backers. Part of the reason JS Weekly posted the project was because it was already successful, thanks in part to the HN surge, so there was this definite sense of success leading to success. When I launched to the public, the series had already been airing to KS backers for about seven months. I had been collecting email addresses the whole time from people who wanted to subscribe but missed the Kickstarter, and I had somewhere north of 1,000 addresses by the time I went public. So I sent out three "you can subscribe now"…

Hello, as someone who shied away from regular IDEs to use Emacs for programming work, I would recommend that you start setting things up for some very specific need. As it was already pointed out, Emacs is huge and you will never stop learning it. Therefore, if your main line of work implies writing Java code, I would recommend you look for some tutorials that are particularly aimed at that, and build on those as you need more out of your editor. For example right now I am looking at learning org-mode to be able to do time tracking with it. If you seriously consider using Emacs all the time I would recommend remapping the Ctrl key to Caps Lock for easier typing. Since you were asking for some tutorials, these are the two tutorials that I found most useful in defining my Emacs setup: https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/effective-emacs - specific things that are very useful in your configuration http://devblog.avdi.org/category/emacs-reboot/ - someone in the ruby community, remaking his emacs config from scratch and explaining it as he goes I am no where near a proficient Emacs user, but maybe I can provide some insight as a fellow learner if you get stuck. I believe my e-mail should be in my profile if you have any problem starting up with Emacs. Have a nice day, Vlad

> You can remap keys on any keyboard layout "Yeah but" now you're mucking around with software. It's not simply plug-and-play. From its first paragraph, this 2012 article acknowledges that it was sparked by a HN discussion¹ about another article² and that the HN discussion already covered the remapping solutions you are again proposing 12 years later. This article offers the Japanese keyboard idea as an alternative to remapping. --- 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3976669 2. https://avdi.codes/underscores-are-stupid/

Too much attachment to UNIX CLI programming models by some developers. Here is a nice example of REPL driven development with Smalltalk. https://avdi.codes/in-which-i-make-you-hate-ruby-in-7-minutes/

I came across a recent blog post[1], that mentioned some text-to-diagram tools, out of which I liked Gleek.io and nomnoml in particular. [1] https://avdi.codes/tools-for-turning-descriptions-into-diagrams/

These were posted on HN a few days ago: https://avdi.codes/tools-for-turning-descriptions-into-diagrams/

The correct link is this one: https://avdi.codes/on-gatekeeping-complicity-and-arrival/

The direct link isn't working anymore but you can still see the post easily at the top of his blog. https://avdi.codes/blog/

Looks pretty cool, though it is a pretty daunting task to convince all gem developers to test/make their gems compatible. Perhaps this could make http://devblog.avdi.org/2015/08/11/what-its-like-to-come-back-to-a-rub… easier ;)

I agree that it's ugly, but also in some languages you can get into trouble because of operator precedence. This is why ruby and perl have the operators `or` and `and` as well as || and &&. http://devblog.avdi.org/2010/08/02/using-and-and-or-in-ruby/

Alternatively one could use NullObjects for the Optional use case: http://devblog.avdi.org/2011/05/30/null-objects-and-falsiness/

Not exactly. Turns out you can sell via Amazon, or you can sell directly, but if you use the undocumented Amazon-only tool to construct your .mobi, you can't sell that directly. And Amazon is now blocking the output of many/all other ebook construction software so you can't use Send to Kindle or email. USB is the only option to load a book. http://devblog.avdi.org/2014/04/02/why-does-amazon-hate-ebook-authors/

I have been using a Ruby expect-like called Greenletters by Avdi Grimm, introduced on his blog here: http://devblog.avdi.org/2010/07/19/greenletters-painless-automation-an… It's available via rubygems or github: https://github.com/avdi/greenletters

> Nobody talks about duckduckgo because they're search results are better than google's, they talk about them because duckduckgo is all about your privacy. 'Nobody' is such a strong word. http://devblog.avdi.org/2014/02/16/why-duckduckgo-is-better-for-web-de…

About that passion... [1] [1] http://devblog.avdi.org/2014/02/10/the-passion-gospel/

and and or are control-flow modifiers like if and unless. http://devblog.avdi.org/2010/08/02/using-and-and-or-in-ruby/

Ruby Rogues: http://rubyrogues.com/ Ruby Tapas: http://devblog.avdi.org/rubytapas/

Avdi Grimm post about Set http://devblog.avdi.org/2012/08/27/array-set-operations-in-ruby/

Here are the slides from the presentation on the same topic given by Avdi. http://avdi.org/talks/exceptional-ruby-2011-02-04/