A Path Less Taken

This past weekend I attended CodeWorks 2009 in Dallas, TX and it was great. I got to meet some notable people in the PHP community and hear some interesting topics. I thought it would be good to share the high points of the experience.

I’ve considered spending some time coding in Ruby to get a sense of what is so interesting about that language. I’m not ready to start this exercise yet, but I did spend some time looking at Ruby code frameworks. Of course there is Ruby on Rails, but I figured there would be some other frameworks out there and that reading about them would provide some meaningful contrast and tell me what Rails is and what it is not. I decided to list some of the apparently more popular ones for my future reference and yours. Ramaze peaked my interest the most. The Nitro site was missing when I tried it. I included the link anyway in hopes it will be fixed soon.

If you have never been to ohloh then you should definitely check it out. Ohloh’s goal in their own words is “to provide more visibility into software development.” To that end ohloh appears to crawl source code repositories and compiles a number of metrics about the languages, comments, contributors, and other data that can be measured. Then it provides graphs of the data that allow you to compare projects and languages. If you are interested in open source development then you should check this site out.

Not surprisingly, I have a keen interest in web hosting for us little guys. I was digging around on the web today and I happened upon this interview with Casey Forbes who is the co-founder and lead developer for Ravelry. Ravelry is an on-line site, community, etc for the knit and crochet community. The interview and the site are relevant to me for two reasons.