Author: Jamie Flournoy

Subversion 1.5 will include merge tracking

Despite Linus’ strident criticism of Subversion (in the 70 minute video he accuses Subversion, and then anybody who wrote it, and then anybody who likes it, of being ugly and stupid) I still use Subversion and I like it. Clearly compared to Linus I am ugly and stupid. OK fine. But I’m not switching to git now because my tiny teams have been fine with Subversion. Maybe later I’ll give git a whirl.
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Impressions of Ruby on Rails from an ex J2EE developer (me)

A friend who is working primarily in the J2EE technology world (as I was, until early 2006) asked me for a how’s-it-going with respect to Ruby and Rails.

The short version:
– Ruby is fun to program in, as you’ve probably heard
– Rails is over-hyped, but it’s still quite good (definitely not perfect)
– I like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet by any means
– Ruby performance was bad and is getting less bad, and can even be good if you do what the experts say
– The real gem (har har) in the Ruby and Rails space is the community itself
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Removing framework clutter from autotest failure stacktraces

If you’re programming in Ruby, then in the list of “should be’s” is “using autotest“, assuming you’re doing automated testing, which of course is a giant “should be”. One problem if you’re using a bunch of gems or Rails is that their code works and yours is broken but the failure stacktraces you’re reading contain their method names mixed in with yours. 99% of the time this is distracting. So, using some code from Faisal that did the same thing with an older version of Autotest but doesn’t work in the latest release, I hacked up the code to help remove unwanted text from Autotest test output. And now I present it to you.
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Hacking rake:stats to get gross LOC

Web App Autopsy has some juicy metrics such as the 100:10:1 ratio of anonymous visitors to free registered users to paying users. But they also have LOC counts which seem quite high, and which include things that rake:stats (a Rake task that’s part of Rails, which counts lines of source code and provides some basic analysis) doesn’t count. So, I hacked rake:stats to include them. Here’s what I did:
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