WANTED: Software Craftsmen (and Women)

My employer, Songkick.com are hiring for developers. To join this team you must be, or believe you are capable of being, someone who creates beautiful software. Nothing less. If you think that sounds like you, do yourself a favour: stop working for those idiots who keep making you rush out all that half-arsed crap and …

MagLev: Death of the Relational Database?

I just got around to watching Avi Bryant’s talk on MagLev, a new Ruby VM built on top of GemStone’s Smalltalk VM. http://www.vimeo.com/1147409 Presumably this is the kind of thing Smalltalkers have been able to do for decades, but to me the prospect of having this kind of freedom on a Ruby platform is very …

In Defence of class << self

I recently came across this blog post from the venerable Chris Wanstrath (of github / err the blog fame) which took me somewhat aback. Chris suggests that using class << self to contain class methods (C# / Java programmers read ‘static methods’) is a harmful habit that should be discouraged. I dislike class methods generally: …