The Sherpa Project

CodeMash is a wonderful conference. This will be the second year of the conference and it’s well worth your time to attend. Unfortunately, I’m not going to make it this year (baby on the way), but I would highly recommend that you check it out if you get a chance.

There’s a great lineup of talks with some great speakers (Scott Hanselman, Jim Holmes, Neal Ford, Bruce Eckel, Joe O’Brien, Dave Donaldson, Josh Holmes, Dick Wall, and many others).

It’s certainly $175 well spent.

I’ve played around a bit with Ruby and Rails over the past couple of years, but I haven’t done any significant programming in either. After attending CodeMash and sitting in on a few great sessions around both Ruby and Rails, I decided to start using Ruby as my primary scripting language and I made a commitment to play around some more with Rails.

The best resource that I’ve had had in both of these situations are each respective cookbook from O’Reilly. I’ve always known enough to hack around, but it’s been wonderful just skimming the books and getting a grasp on the capabilities and common tasks for each one.

I’ve found out a lot about how to effectively use Ruby and I’ve found many capabilities that I didn’t think that were possible (at least easily) with Rails.

These books are both great resources, superbly written, and deserve a place on your bookshelf.

CodeMash has started! To see what’s going on, check out technorati and flickr.
I just attended the keynote session by Neal Ford. I have to say that it was one of the best keynotes that I’ve seen in a long time. The session was “Domain Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm.”

I’ve heard that the slides will all be posted. I’ll update this post with a link to the deck when it is published.