Today is the three year anniversary of my written commitment to move to Boston. That’s amazing and time has really flown by.

Technically, I moved to Boston on March 6th, 2006, but I accepted the offer to work at Eons on February 15th, 2006.

I have to admit, moving out to Boston ended up being one of the strangest blessings of my life. It all started with a conversation with my wife, sending off a resume, and having an e-mail conversation with some guy named “Reed Sturtevant”. Meeting Reed in person made me realize working for him was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and if I passed it up, I’d never get another chance like that again.

Three years later, it’s very likely we’ll never leave Boston. Although we’ve swayed back and forth because our families are in Michigan, Boston is truly a wonderful place to live, learn, and raise children.

To the people who trusted me to bring me here and taught me so much, I wanted to say thank you.

If you live in the Boston area and want to learn Ruby, I suggest you come check out my Ruby class at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education (CCAE). The class is a very economical way to learn Ruby and Rails, or improve your knowledge of either Ruby or Rails.

Why take this class?

This class is not one of those one or two day Ruby/Rails “boot camp” classes that costs $1000+. It is a 8 week, 2 hour per week Ruby and Rails class that costs less than $250.00. Next to free, it’s probably the lowest cost way to get up to speed with Ruby and Rails.

Why are you teaching it?

On the Ruby end of things, I have been involved in the Ruby and Rails community for over four years, starting somewhere between Rails 0.10 and 0.11. I’ve contributed to the Ruby on Rails framework, the Rubinius virtual machine, RubySpec, the Rails ActiveRecord SQLServer adapter, HTTParty, Thinking Sphinx, Mongrel cluster, memcache-client, and several other projects.

Related to teaching, I taught an introduction to programming class to Calculus students in high school, and after I graduated I tutored students for two semesters in college in Visual Basic, C++, HTML, and PERL. I have spent the last three years helping developers transition from Java, PHP, and PERL to Ruby, working at startups in groups of 20+ developers, working at large companies deploying with tools such as JRuby, SQL Server, and integrating with SOAP services. Recently, I helped launch a Rails web application using JRuby to the US Navy, again integrating with SOAP web services.

So, if you or someone you know is looking for a Ruby class in Boston, send them my way!

I am considering doing a weekly update on my open source projects and contributions, as a way to “pimp” my projects and motivate myself to continue to contribute. This could be the first of many.

I’ve been living in JRuby and SQL Server land for the last few days, as that will be our primary deployment environment to the Navy. I found a bug in the activerecord-jdbc-adapter this week, which generates a select distinct subselect with an order by (which, as far as I know is invalid in SQL Server. The issue is kind of squirrely, but the jist is that it appears to happen using a named_scope, including a has_many :through, and order by.

I also noticed that httparty by default is not JRuby compatible, because it uses json, which is a C extension. I forked httparty and added conditionals to make it build with json_pure when running JRuby.

I’m continuing my work on porting fpdi to Ruby, still resolving bugs and issues with hash ordering. Hopefully in the next few weeks I’ll have something more interesting to say about it. At this point, it generates partially-valid PDF data, but unfortunately partial doesn’t really cut it. The project is only about two and a half weeks old, so if I could get it running simple cases in less than a month, I’d be thrilled. That’s the goal.

Lastly, I am working on added a generator to the ServiceProxy, using templater. The idea would not be to generate full build and parse methods initially, but just to stub the build and parse methods so that users could get started quicker without having to completely understand how to read WSDL.

Everyone has New Year’s resolutions, so here’s mine:

This year I’ve resolved to take baby steps, starting with The Calendar About Nothing. So far, I haven’t broken the chain. Let’s meet back here in December and see if my streak is at 365, shall we?

As a further step to that, I’ve resolved to be open. Very open. I’ve already started the process, putting several libraries on Github that I am working on. I am going to be pushing out anything that I am legally able to, to Github.

I also decided that I really miss music, so I bought the wife a guitar (Epiphone Les Paul Special), borrowed her old guitar and started learning. I can already read music from my orchestra days, so it was just learning the hard stuff. The goal is to practice every day, but most likely it’ll be 3-4 times a week.

Lastly, I’ve decided that this is the year to get out there and network, etc. Living the last four years in the Rails community has shown me that it’s not necessarily the best people who get the farthest, but usually the best networkers. I’m not necessarily looking to get the farthest, but it’s always nice to not fade away either. It’s sad that salesmanship is an important part of being excellent in my chosen profession, but there you have it.

Related to getting out and networking, I will be teaching a Ruby and Rails class at the CCAE in Cambridge MA. The class will be ultra-cheap (<$200), last 8-weeks, and hopefully while cramming a lot of material into a short amount of time, teach the students enough about Ruby and Rails to be successful. The class starts April 7th from 8-10pm. I don’t get paid based on how many students there are, just in case you’re wondering.

I’m also flirting with the idea of starting a polyglot programming group in the Boston area. Getting people with many different language interests and expertise together to share ideas, tips, and tricks. I’ll keep you updated on that.

This small list should keep me going for another year, at least!

This blog is now upgraded to Merb 1.0, and is now running DataMapper. The plan is, going forward to run DataMapper. Please tell me you run into any issues.