I have a good friend named Oliver Kofoed who is a brilliant .NET developer. Oliver is an entrepreneur and has written the entire backend for Nonoba and Player IO, he has written his own object-relational mapper (ORM), templating system, multiplayer game server, content management system and so on. He has also been toying with several experimental .NET languages over the years (such as Boo) and even worked a bit on one of his own. Oliver is both curious and passionate about development, and he was in fact the one who initially told me about Ruby on Rails – I owe you one, Oliver ;)

I occasionally nudge Oliver about releasing some of his work as open source, but it has yet to happen. I don’t think Oliver mind sharing his stuff with the community, but the fact is that it takes a lot of work to prepare your code for open sourcing, especially if you haven’t build it with that in mind from the beginning. You need to take anything out that’s specific to your own applications, you have to write at least some documentation and you probably also have to make the code a bit more configurable and modular. To make that effort you need to get something in return from the community – you have to be reasonably sure that your efforts will be appreciated and that your peers will respect you for sharing valuable code with them.

The best way to get a name in the Ruby community is to release a piece of open source software that help other people get their work done. Ruby on Rails is a pretty good example of this. In fact, in a typical stack for running a Rails-based website, not a single piece of software is proprietary. From the operating system and programming language, the database and the web server to the web framework, gems and plugins used in the application, everything is free and open source. To be fair, the .NET framework is also free, limited versions of the development IDEs and the SQL server database are free and I believe it is currently even possible to get free hosting on Windows Azure. But none of these things are open source and that makes an important difference in the perception of the importance of open sourcing in the eyes of .NET developers, I believe. When most of your stack is closed source, you don’t see the need to share your own source with anyone else either.

There is of course lots of great open source projects within the .NET community: NUnit, Log4Net, NAnt, NHibernate (I’m not sure why I can only think of ports of open source Java projects right now) and also some great “higher-level” open source projects such as Umbraco. Many of these has existed for a long time, but it’s a relatively new thing that Microsoft has started releasing parts of their own projects as open source with ASP.NET MVC – a web framework that’s essentially a port of Ruby on Rails (minus the ActiveRecord ORM) to .NET done by some of Microsoft’s best developers – as the prime example. This is awesome, and ASP.NET MVC is deservingly winning a lot .NET developers over from the broken notion of “web forms”. I’m not sure how easy it is to build and share plugins for ASP.NET MVC, but hopefully the project will help more .NET developers to realize the value of sharing code. In the Ruby world we have Github for sharing and collaborating on open source projects, and Codeplex might be able to do the same for .NET – or .NET developers could start using git, but that’s a different story.

ASP.NET MVC also endorses test-driven development, which is another key differentiator when comparing the Ruby and .NET communities. To be honest, I think some .NET developers have even harder seeing the value of testing than of open sourcing. They use a static language after all, so the compiler “tests” that all is good, right? Wrong. Even without tests, problems with wrong types and nil-reference exceptions (“null” is called “nil” in Ruby) are usually easily found and fixed in Ruby. What needs to be tested is intend. Business logic. Calculations. Complicated SQL queries. Redirects. The flow of the application. Test-driven development (TDD) forces the developer to think before he acts, and later it gives him the freedom to refactor without the fear of breaking existing functionality. I understand any developer who feel it is a waste of time to write tests after you have written the actual production code – it’s not, but it feels like it. TDD gives the pleasure of accomplishing hundreds of small steps in the fail-pass test cycle every day, and I hope the popularity of the ASP.NET MVC will push .NET developers more in this direction.

I have of course attended all sessions related to Ruby at MIX10 (all three of them), and Microsoft’s prime example of what to use IronRuby (the .NET implementation of Ruby) for seems to be testing. They love to show off RSpec and Cucumber, and yes, those are cool testing frameworks, but will it really make .NET developers write their test code in a language different from the production code? To me, IronRuby is the .NET developer’s chance to spread the love and magic of Ruby in their Microsoft-centric companies, and just like Rails has been the killer app for the traditional C-version of Ruby, I believe this fantastic web framework can also be the driver of a wide adoption of IronRuby. ASP.NET MVC will be the segway for this, because MVC and Rails have so much in common, that when you understand one, you understand them both – provided you also know C# and Ruby, that is.

Yes, I said “the love and magic of Ruby”. If you think it sounds cheesy, that’s because it is, but the fact is that I’ve seen several slides at MIX10 with statements such as “Ruby is love” and “We love Ruby on Rails”. Ruby is a pretty programming language, and Rails is an awesome framework – but really working with Ruby is all about being passionate about programming, being curious about new technology and have a desire to be on the “cutting edge”. I’m not saying that .NET developers are not those things, but I’ll make this claim: The ratio of highly passionate developers actively seeking the cutting edge of software development is higher in the Ruby community than in the .NET community. There is some very simple reasons for this: First of all, the Ruby community is smaller and has a smaller customer base, which leaves less room for … let’s say “average” developers. Second, almost everyone in the Ruby community comes from a different technical background and has made an active choice to switch to Ruby. C# is a language taught in schools, there are certifications and programs, and in some environments I believe you’d hardly even consider the alternatives. This again leaves more room for the “average” developer who is by no means a bad programmer or person, but who is not building and seeking out new things on the cutting edge. To him, programming is more a job than a passion, and he might even do something else with his spare time than sit in front of the computer.

The point I am trying to make is this: Ruby has a community consisting almost entirely of early adopters, while .NET has many followers in the community. This is not necessarily a problem – in fact it can be very pragmatic not to be on the cutting edge. On the other hand, .NET developers are missing out on a lot of the good stuff by waiting for Microsoft to tell them what to do. As an example, my impression from MIX10 is that the javascript framework jQuery is still a very new thing to many .NET developers, while it is something we have used for years in the Ruby community. I was learning about jQuery at a Rails-conference two years ago, and back then I felt I was late in the game. What’s interesting is that Ruby on Rails is in fact pretty tightly integrated with another javascript framework – Prototype (much too tightly in fact, but that has been remedied in Rails 3) – but we were so blown away by the productivity and community surrounding jQuery that we switched anyway. The fact that Rails is open source and that Ruby is a dynamic language that allows any code to be changed, overridden and monkeypatched, allowed someone to quickly release a plugin that modified all places where Rails currently generates Prototype-specific javascript. Sure, ASP.NET MVC is also open source, but if someone wanted to make a fundemental change such as the one in this example, they would probably have to release a separate branch of the framework the with modified code, since a plugin wouldn’t be able to modify the statically typed and compiled code.

The Ruby community is not perfect. Some think we are arrogant. I can think of at least one person about which this is true, and perhaps you think I’m another good example after having read this. I am actually impressed with how humble and down-to-earth the VIP’s of the .NET community seemed to at MIX10. Another thing you could say about us is that we are trying to avoid dealing with real-world problems by going into Ruby. We leave the .NET developers to maintain and extend existing enterprise solutions built on Microsoft technology, while we go out and build entrepreneurial web apps from scratch. Personally, I like being curious, passionate and on the cutting edge, but it might not be for everyone. Are you a passionate developer?

© 2010 MIX

You might have noticed that I did not link HTML5 to W3C’s specification of the language, but rather to the Wikipedia entry. The reason for that is not just the entry on Wikipedia is much easier to read than any academical spec, but also that W3C’s spec is not necessarily the official spec – or least not the only recognized spec. Molly Holzschlag explained how members of the XHTML 2.0 working group in 2004 grew tired of the slow progress and seemingly wrong direction of what was at the time supposed to be the next generation of HTML, and formed their own working group known as WHAT-WG. These “cowboys”, as Holzschlag likes to call them, very quickly (that is, they did in less than a year!) reached consensus on a new spec and further managed to get all the major browser vendors on board. As a result, W3C eventually shut down their XHTML 2 working group and started their own HTML5 working which adapts and formalizes the WHAT-WG spec into the the long legal specs we know and love … right.

So what is HTML5, really? Is it just the a couple of new tags and features such as built-in client-side form validation? That’s a big part of it, but to be more specific, Holzschlag explained, the term HTML5 covers at least three things: The “cowboy-spec” by WHAT-WG, the “approved” spec by W3C, and then the “umbrella” technology that everybody else talks about. Just as AJAX as a term covers much than sending asynchronous javascript and XML, HTML5 has almost become synonymous with “Web 3.0″ and covers everything that the next generations of browsers will support. And that’s fine, as long as we realize what we are talking about when we say HTML5.

In the Thuesday morning keynote Microsoft announced great enthusiasm about HTML5 in Internet Explorer 9. They are dedicated to get the same markup work across all browsers, but at the same time they are completely in line with an interesting thing Molly Holzschlag said: “Implementation always trumps specification”. So the IE9 team made a tool that crawled the 7000 biggest websites on the Internet and analyzed what features currently missing in IE8 are used the most. So in a very pragmatic way, IE9 will support what people already use and introduce all the new aspects of HTML5.

If you speak Danish, make sure you check out the podcast Daniel Frost has recorded here at MIX featuring me and two other developers talking about our experiences from the first day of the conference.

Today I decided to cheat on Rails. And I’m not talking going back to the ugly ex, ASP.NET, or getting back in touch with old flirts such as PHP or Java, no … Once you go Ruby, you don’t go back.

But there are other Ruby web frameworks than Rails. “What? I thougth Ruby was invented for Rails, as a kind of unintentional side effect?” you might say, but it is no so. Until recentl, Merb has probably been the most well-known “Ruby-based framework that is not Rails”, but now the two are getting hitched and as such we have to look elsewhere for alternative Ruby frameworks.

Webby is one such framework. Or to be fair, Webby is so much less than both Rails and Merb, and that’s the whole point. Webby are for simple, static home pages that can be hosted on anywhere. The Ruby framework generates static html files based on layouts and content pieces defined in the project. It doesn’t use a database, it doesn’t parse forms and that is exactly the simplicity you sometimes need.

The two greatest benefits in Webby is:

1. Content is plain text files and can be put in source control painlessly
2. Output is plain html files and be deployed anywhere with just FTP, RSync or SSH

As I see it, this makes Webby the perfect “un-CMS” for a web site maintained by developers. We don’t want to type in long texts in textareas in the browser – we want to do it Textmate or whatever our favorite text editor is called. We want full control over the HTML, we want speed and we want real versioning for our content.

Some times Rails is just plain overkill.

Resources:

• Webby homepage
• Great Webby tutorial (but a bit outdated, make sure to replace references to webby with webby-gen, and references to rake with webby.)
• Another good tutorial

We were all there. The geeks, the journalists, the communication and new media consultants and the Internet entrepreneurs. Copenhagen Twestival was my first experience of meeting the Twitter community, and my guess is it was probably also the largest gathering of Danish Twitter users to date – we were around 120 people. Turns out that the Danish tweet-crowd consists of many well known faces from gatherings such as Copenhagen Ruby Brigade, Barcamp Copenhagen and Reboot.

Copenhagen Twestival was, along with many other similar meetings around the world, a charity event with the purpose of raising money for charity:water – an organization that argues that clean drinking water is the essential foundation upon which developing countries can evolve into something better. I can’t claim that I suffer from any great social conscience, but when Maame Agyeben – a former intern with the organization – told about charity:water, I was truly impressed. Their administration costs is sponsored separately, which makes them able to say that 100% of the general donations goes to building wells.

Red Cross and other global help organizations are doing a great job, but I like the prospects of charity organizations with a more narrow and dedicated purpose being able to pursue their cause globally by innovative use of Internet services. That night, we generated DKK 5,000 from the sale of 500 lottery tickets to win donated gifts, and probably a similar amount from buying overpriced, donated drinks.

© 2009 Rasmus Luckow

The twestival was not just about water and charity. Members of the Danish Twitter community had prepared presentations, and one of them was Mikkel Malmberg a.k.a. mikker with a talk about Twitter – for people who know Twitter. Mikkel was introduced as “the craziest guy on Twitter”, and he showed himself worthy of the title with an entertaining and energetic show. I wouldn’t do his talk any justice by repeating it in text – you will have to see him in person some other time.

The culmination of the evening was the Twitter panel, consisting of Henrik Fohns, journalist from DR, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, entrepreneur and organizer of Reboot, and Troels Jørgensen, director of Berlingske Online. The format was a number of predefined questions – ideally in 140 characters or less – which each panel member got a chance to reply to. Fohns is a well-known voice from a long-running Danish radio series on technology – Harddisken – and it was good to see him in the flesh. It was also clear that this was a man with great experience in voicing his opinion on media and technology in comfortable, well-phrased sentences, and I for one felt compelled to believe in everything he said just from the familiarity of the voice.

© 2009 Rasmus Luckow

Another familiar voice was that of Mygdal. I know him from his Reboot opening speeches and from some of the many technology projects he is involved with, but I didn’t know how opinionated and loud-mouthed he could be once someone gave him a microphone and asked him to voice his opinions. He reminded me of the hero in the Ruby on Rails community – David Heinemeier Hansson – but where David’s battle is with “enterprise” software development, Thomas’ seems to be with established media and journalism.

The first question was about the future news outlook. Mygdal said that journalists does a poor job, because it is impossible to do what they do. Also that the business model for news papers hasn’t changed in 250 years, which why they are they are now in so much trouble. “It’s pure biology”, he said, “nobody tries anything [..] We are really fucked, but we have to try something and fail.” Fohns compared the volunteer news papers run by all kinds of unemployed people in the 80’s to today’s blogging. It is journalism by the unestablished, he said, and he called it “New Cultural Press”.

© 2009 Rasmus Luckow

Another question was: Do we even need the traditional media? Troels Jørgensen was of the opinion that journalists has far too high wages in Denmark, compared to Sweden, for instance, and that was one reason it is so hard and expensive to run a media house in 2009. Mygdal pointed out that we use the term “new media” every time something new comes along that we doesn’t quite understand. In the mid-90’s, the Internet was called “new media”. He said that we need to reinvent media in a way that really brings the new opportunities together, instead of just trying to coerce “new media” into “old media”.

One final question worth mentioning was on the issue of media subsidy. As Mygdal put it: “We spend 6 billion on media subsidy – the government could finance 2,000 micro medias at 3 million each a year for that money.” However, as Fohns objected, working in small units, you don’t always have the required impact. As an example he mentioned the case of IT Factory, where the freelancer Dorte Toft, who spearheaded the whole uncovering process, were under a lot of pressure from the lawyers of Stein Bagger. That kind of pressure is easier too handle when you are part of something bigger, and have lawyers and other support of your own to back you up.

© 2009 Kristoffer Solberg

I also remember that Mygdal mentioned at some point that Twitter really isn’t something new, that it is simply derived from blogging as a format better suited for people like himself, who might not be that good at formulating long articles. What do you think, perhaps I’d also be better off just keeping to 140 character outbursts? :)

Thank you for helping me out, thank you for doing business with me, and thank you for following my ramblings. Let’s do it all again next year!

Now that I’ve had some time to experience self-employment on my own, I’ve come to realize that there are many similarities between being an entrepreneur and being a nissemand. Both is hard, but when and if you reach the happy ending, everything will be good. As a Christmas greeting especially for you, I’ve recorded a song about just that :)

I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

All the best,
Casper

Github is great, but there is really no reason to pay for private git repositories unless you need the added functionality. I have a Dreamhost account that I am happy with, so why not use that for my private git repos? It is easy to do through SSH, now that git is installed on all Dreamhost servers, but it is not that easy, so I thought I’d better document it here for my own future reference.

(This stuff is tested on Mac OSX, and should work fine for *nix users. Windows users will have to do some workarounds, but can use this as a reference point.)

Create and add your public key (optional)
If you are used to use SSH access with Dreamhost, you probably already have this step setup, but if you don’t, this will help you avoid having to type your password everyone you connect through SSH, which will be every time you pull and push to and from the git repo on Dreamhost.

If haven’t done any SSH at all, you will probably need to generate a public/private set of RSA keys:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Then you’ll need to to add your public key to your server (thanks to Dave the Wave for this trick):

cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user@domain.tld 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

And with that, you can SSH to the server without typing your password, which is almost a must when doing git over SSH.

Create the dreamgit shell script
Toolman Tim explains very well how to setup a remote git repository over SSH, but it is easy to mess things up, and I’m planning on doing all my stuff in git from now on – so an automated script to suit my needs is essential.

I am not an expert in either git or shell scripting, so this script can probably be optimized quite a bit – in fact I am more than willing to update it if I get any comments from the real experts out there. But this script works for me:

DREAMGIT_DOMAIN=user@domain.tld
ssh $DREAMGIT_DOMAIN 'mkdir -p ~/git/'$1'.git && cd ~/git/'$1'.git && git --bare init'
mkdir $1
cd $1
git init
git remote add origin ssh://$DREAMGIT_DOMAIN/~/git/$1.git
touch .gitignore
git add .
git commit -m 'Created new repo'
git push origin master
echo "
[branch \"master\"]
  remote = origin
  merge = refs/heads/master" >>.git/config
echo "Your new git repo '$1' is ready and initialized at $DREAMGIT_DOMAIN/~/git/$1.git"

Put the above code into a file you place in a directory in your PATH. Remember to change user@domain.tld to your real Dreamhost SSH user and domain. I’ve selected to name the command dreamgit and put it in /usr/local/bin like this:

sudo mate /usr/local/bin/dreamgit

Paste the code in and save the file. Make your new command executable:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/dreamgit

You now have a new command – dreamgit – that you can invoke in any directory on your local machine. You call it with a single argument – the name of your project – like this:

dreamgit test05

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/.char/cfp/git/test05.git/
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
Created initial commit f4fbb71: Created new repo
 0 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 .gitignore
Counting objects: 3, done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 220 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To ssh://cfp@casperfabricius.com/~/git/test05.git
 * [new branch]      master -> master
Your new git repo 'test05' is ready and initialized at cfp@casperfabricius.com/~/git/test05.git

As it says – you now have a fresh repository ready for action, pulling and pushing to your remote repo at Dreamhost.

How it works
On the server, it creates a folder named git in your home directory – if it doesn’t already exists – and creates a directory named project_name.git in it. It then initializes a bare git repo in that directory, meaning that the repo will hold the git database only, and is not used for doing actual work in.

On your local machine it creates a directory with the project name, initializes a git repo in it, adds an commit an empty .gitignore file to it, and pushes that to the remote repo on your server. Finally it sets up the remote repo to be the default push and pull location for the master branch the local repository. This way, we only have to type git push and git pull without specifying which remote repo and branch we want to interact with.

Copyright © 2008: Thomas Kristiansen

Here is some mixed impressions from night:

• Meeting Henriette for the first time and realizing that her hair looks even more impressive IRL.
• Geek talking about iPhone, RadiantCMS and other good stuff with fellow members of the Copenhagen Ruby Brigade.
• Accusing MC of sounding like Martin Fowler when he asks insightful questions from the back of the room during presentations. His answer to these accusations is: “Who is Martin Fowler??”
• Helping an ITU student realize that a nice no-so-geeky subject for her upcoming technical four-weeks assignment could be something about agile development.
• Recommending Michael to go Thailand for his next business adventure, even though I have never been there myself.
• Sneaking out and starting early on the very delicious buffet, consisting of plenty of small Mediterranean dishes.
• Meeting for the first time a Turk – Tayfun – who is not trying to fit into the narrow-minded Danish society, but is simply an exchange student from DTU.
• Discussing C# versus Ruby with Allan. Why is the first thing .NET guys ask always: “So, what IDE do you use for Ruby?” ??

My own presentation turned out to be only the second-most geeky of the night (MC’s on IPv6 being number one on that list), and I think it went pretty well. Perhaps I shouldn’t admit this, but it was a bit of rip-off from Dr. Nic’s talk at RailsConf Europe 2007, although my attempts at being funny, while keeping up the proud tradition of ridiculing non-Ruby programming languages, was to compare PHP to a Chihuahua dog and C# to Uffe Holm.

It turned out, however, that my last slide was what generated the most response. It was nothing more than a screenshot of the heroku.com in-browser Ruby on Rails editor and recommendation of using this innovative service to get started with Rails. Perhaps I should do a full article about Heroku in the near future.

To those of you who were at BarCamp: Great meeting you! To those who weren’t there: Don’t miss out next year! And finally a big thanks to Henriette and Thomas for organizing the event, to Beaconware for hosting it, and not least: Thanks for the food and beers!

In Denmark, this song is always put on TV just after the clock has struck midnight. On TV, it is a large girl’s choir performing, but I thought it was time for a change.

So here it is, my way of wishing you a fantastic 2008!

This year was my 14th year at Roskilde. While memories from the many years are hard to keep apart, each year is something special. This year will, without a doubt, first and foremost be remembered as the rainiest Roskilde Festival ever. Roskilde usually has rain; this year it had a flood. Roskilde usually has mud; this year it had liquid dirt. Roskilde usually has puddles (of rainwater, that is), this year it had ponds. But I won’t be one to complain – I had water in my tent at one point, but I was lucky to be camping in a relatively dry area.

In fact, I took pleasure in defying the rain. The festival opened Thursday at 5 PM, and at 1 PM, I was invited to a 10-year anniversary reception far away in the West camp. Thursday was the most rainy day of the festival, and probably will be the most rainy day of this entire year. It poured down for almost 24 hours non-stop, and I had to cross several ponds of mud deeper than the top of my wellies, but I made through to the reception party, and spent the next few hours eating canapés and drinking Champaign, a very odd thing to do indeed at Roskilde.

I also had great music experiences at the festival. Two bands, whose albums I immediately need to buy, are Goose and Loney, Dear, but I also enjoyed a number of Danish acts, as well as the band ending the festival; Basement Jaxx. That last concert, especially, reminded my of a thing that is so unique to Roskilde: People are always so damn nice to each other! I was up in front of the main stage, Orange, and of course it takes a lot of cheering, jumping, dancing, pushing, shoving and shouting to be part of the spearhead of 50.000 people, but it never gets uncomfortable or nasty.

Alas, 7 people died in front of Orange Stage in 2000, but the festival and the audience really learned from that. If I accidentally hit someone in my wild cheering (and that happens a lot), I apologize with a smile, and get a smile back. If I find me and my 189 centimetres towering in front a group of girls trying to see just a bit of the stage, I offer them to get in front of me. If things get wild and some of the more intoxicated people in the audience can’t behave them selves, I use my size to protect those who are smaller around me. The great thing is, most people tend are just as considerate as me, and that’s what’s makes the whole thing work.

I wouldn’t call this The Orange Feeling, but there has been an interesting discussion about that at Jaiku. Speaking of Jaiku; I attempted to microblog from the festival, and also wrote 16 entries during those 5 days, but I wasn’t really able to check on comments from the mobile phone, and didn’t really get that many anyway. It was an experiment, and I don’t know what to make of it yet. See you next year!