MissingMethod

The other night at our monthly RUM (Ruby Users of Minnesota) Meeting, Paul Cantrell gave a talk/magic show about closures in Ruby. Basically, a closure is a block of code that you can pass around as a value, and always refers back to its original context when executed. Unfortunately, Ruby has a bunch of constructs that look/act like closures, but aren’t exactly closures.

Paul made the discussion really interesting, and I learned a ton. He has posted some notes from his talk; go check them out!

John over at Burm.net has posted an unofficial list of live demos of RailsDay appss. Check it out!

Sneakology.com is coming soon. LIVE! In the meantime, check out some of our competition:

• Cuppin by Ray ?
• TODO by Erik Gregg
• Concourse by Phil Hagelberg, Cristi Balan and Ferdinand Svehla
• Advisr by Ezra Zygmuntowicz
• Good To Garden by Will Emigh
• SimpleForms by Jon Maddox

Also don’t miss the RailsDay tag on Flickr; lots of funny photos of tired programmers.

Wow. RailsDay was awesome. We started working at 11pm on Friday night, and we didn’t stop (or sleep) for 24 hours.

You can see our SVN check-in history here. The site we built is called Sneakology, it’s a social networking-type application for people who are crazy about shoes. We hope to deploy it to Sneakology.com early this week.

There were a ton of great contestants this year, including a lof of people I really respect, like Geoffrey Grosenbach and Justin Palmer, so I’m really excited to see what other teams built. Let the judging begin!

I was looking at a way to find the difference between two arrays and my friend Ben clued me in to a nice shortcut I wasn’t familiar with:

>> fruits = ['apple', 'bannana', 'grapes']

>> fruits_i_hate = ['banana', 'blueberries']

>> fruits_i_like = fruits - fruits_i_hate

=> ['apple', 'grapes']

You can even string them together:

>> fruits - fruits_i_hate - fruits_that_are_bad_for_me

(or something like that).

Pretty cool.

Sneakology.

def. A person of ambiguous gender who is good at math.

Ben and I will be building an app for RailsDay (can’t say what it is yet, mainly because we haven’t decided). Coding starts (for us) at 11pm on June 16th at 11 p.m. So I was wondering; are all your RailsDay coders out there going to be coding straight through the night?

I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t say I’m at my best between about 2 and 6 in the morning. But maybe if I slept all day Saturday I could have something left in the tank for the all-nighter. We’ll see…

def. Fighting for political causes with your butt.