Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with ruby

What's the current hotness for web development frameworks?

meowzilla — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 10:35:47 -0800

What are the best options for quickly developing web applications? I'm looking for something as fast as possible to set up and get running, instead of getting bogged down in setup and configuration details. I've got experience in LAMP almost eight years ago, but that's an example of something that takes too long to integrate everything together, then requires a few more frameworks on top of the "P" layer. I know PHP, Perl, SQL, JS, HTML, and CSS (and can probably learn any other mainstream language) but I don't know what frameworks tie them all well together.

I'm not concerned about scalability, performance, or security; just a very simple CRUD (create, read, update, delete) application. Maybe even just the read part is enough.

Ruby on Rails was the talk of the town a few years ago - is it still the best option? I've touched node.js and all-JS sounds promising, but what do I need to build on top of it to get going? Are Java-based frameworks still unwieldy and overdesigned? And I don't have any idea how CMSes like Joomla or Django work - they seem designed for blogs or static websites.

Advice for a female getting into programming as 2nd career?

lattiboy — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:54:58 -0800

I'd like to help my friend look into a career in programming. Best way to do it? Background:

She graduated with a minor in mathematics from a SUNY school and substitute teaches math at an incredibly prestigious private high school. She took some light programming in college and enjoyed it well enough, but got into another non-technical field for a decade.

She left her job about a year ago and has had no luck finding something similar.

Questions:

1) Is there a program I should point her towards that works to get women involved in programming? Better yet one that deals with 2nd career individuals?

2) She's not keen on taking out student loans and going back to school, especially in the current economic climate. I know there are a lot of free online training sites, but what specific resources would people here recommend to get her feet wet?

3) What is generally considered the least daunting language to work with? She's brilliantly smart, but hasn't touched a command line in 11 years. I've been told PERL or Ruby are good ones, but opinions are all over.

Thanks so much.

Content management systems in Ruby -- where are they at in 2013?

steinsaltz — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 10:48:19 -0800

I'm interested in using a Ruby CMS as a substitute for the usual Wordpress or Drupal. Although I know my way around Rails, I am not sure whether there might be a good off-the-shelf way to make the control panel as easy to use for regular folks who are not programmers. I know there are some gems with pre-fab admin panels and stuff like that. And I've looked around at some of the screenshots of Refinery and Locomotive and similar systems. I am wondering which is the furthest along in development and what the best way to go would be for a large organization with a small budget and short deadline.

Mostly, I wonder if anyone out there has had any good experiences using these as substitutes for, say, Drupal? I'm conflicted because while Drupal tends to be preferred by the kinds of organizations I want to work with -- and I even have a soft spot for its arcane PHP hooks -- I'd like to see if it is possible to reach the same ends in Ruby.

The customers comes first, though, and I would hate to annoy them by putting my computer science interests ahead of easy dashboard controls.

I talked to a guy recently who said he tried to make his own Wordpress clone in Ruby and went running back to it after he realized he had failed to appreciate how many wonderful things it does for you.

Anyhow, has anyone ever used one of these Ruby on Rails CMSes for a pretty big website and found it a good substitute for the popular PHP ones?

Spinning, exploding Excel-driven web app: How or should it be?

metajc — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 08:45:34 -0800

Sometimes, I am a front-end web developer. Frequently, I meet new people at work who want to turn really complicated Excel documents into dazzlingly interactive web applications. Besides Excel's "Save to Web App" or "Save to SharePoint" features, such people ask if I can tap into an industry to support this -- perhaps scads of agencies and web-based or downloadable tools that make "websites" or at least customizable, interactive reports from Excel spreadsheets, data, and calculations. I'm yet to find this an abundance of examples of this. Are there? If so, what do you call them? If you use Google Analytics, MailChimp or Hootsuite, you are familiar with bouncing, cheerful report graphs and charts.

I know that those specific tools required teams and years worth of custom programming. I assume that these apps also derive their presentations from databases that are not Excel files. People seem to passionately believe, however, that there has got to be an easy way to pour Excel spreadsheets into a machine that spits out more simplistic but nonetheless animated pie charts, line charts, map charts, bar charts, etc. You can customize the colors and fonts! Click here to add your logo!

I've been Googling all morning and I see a few discussions on StackOverflow about how to pipe data into and out of this or that via Ruby, Python, Django or PHP. I see a few homebrewed applications that sort of do something via Javascript.

For the sake of specification, say I have an excel file with multiple tabs. Each tab has thousands of rows and nearly 50 columns. The existing Excel charts are based on calculations of those tabs. Is there a web or intranet-friendly tool that will eat that spaghetti and excrete more colorful, JQuery-powered whirligigs?

I don't mean to come off as sarcastic to the believers or naive to those who know. It just seems a tall order to me. Hopefully, I'm wrong.

How to solve a complex statistics problem with a script?

j0hnpaul — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:26:42 -0800

In this game, you roll a number of six-sided dice to get a total. The total is either the highest single die result, or the sum of any multiples rolled, whichever is higher. For example: If I roll three dice and get a 3, 4, and 6, my total is 6. But if I roll a 4, 4, and 6, my total is 8, the sum of the two 4s. What I want to find out is the mean, median, mode, and standard deviation of the possible totals given N dice. How might I create a simple script to compute this? With two or three dice, I can easily figure this out by listing all the possible results, basically by brute force. But that's a pretty labor-intensive method when it comes to four or more dice.

I have a Macintosh, and I'm comfortable using the Unix command line and several programming languages for simple problems, but I'm not even sure where to start automating something like this. I'd be grateful for any guidance.

from making books to making websites

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 19:17:45 -0800

Looking for a path to front-end web development as a career I work in book publishing as a production editor/copyeditor/project manager-type person. I'm feeling burned out and in need of new challenges, and I'm thinking of re-training myself as a front-end web developer.

I taught myself HTML and CSS for ebook production, and I find that I really enjoy structuring documents and doing markup. I've also dabbled in a couple of programming classes over the years and had an aptitude for it, although I never really did anything useful with it. I can imagine how my skillset would be useful in a web environment, but I need to bone up on some current, in-demand tech skills to get in the door of a new industry. Ultimately I'd be interested in exploring content strategy, information architecture, UX design, but I suspect that I need to put in some time on the basics first.

I figure I need Javascript, and to get a personal site or two up as portfolio pieces. What else should I have in my pocket to take me from "no relevant experience" to "worth the trouble to train"? Python? PHP? Drupal? Ruby on Rails? Is actual coursework necessary, or is learning on my own just as good? Assuming I really focus on this, and work on it solidly in my spare time, I'd like to get up and running within 6-9 months.

A couple of caveats: I don't want to be a web project manager. Owning the schedule and coordinating everything is probably my least favorite part of my job. I'd rather do the work than give someone else a deadline to do the work. I have a good eye for design, but I'm not visually creative enough (nor skilled enough with Photoshop) to be a web designer. We'd like to move to a smaller market area, where I'm guessing the available jobs will be more generalist in nature, so nothing too specialized or esoteric. I also have schemes of starting up my own thing, but for now I'd like to be in a position to be hired by someone else, ideally a startup or agency with good quality-of-work-life, nothing corporate or sketchy.

I'm especially interested in enabling technologies that help put it all together -- like git, for example -- but that I might not have heard of as someone who doesn't do this stuff for a living (yet!).

Moving from PostgreSQL to SalesForce with Rails 3

remi — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 22:34:12 -0800

If feasible, how do you move the database backend of a Web application built with Rails 3.2 from PostgreSQL to Salesforce (or Database.com)? It was decided by the management of my company, which has strong connections with Salesforce, to make the next iteration of our Web application built with Rails 3.2 use Salesforce or Database.com instead of PostgreSQL.

I'm asking here how it can be done, if possible, because there are few solutions that come to mind, each with its pros and cons:

The activerecord-activesalesforce-adapter gem sounds like an ideal solution to use Salesforce the same way ActiveRecord is used with various database backends. But the original repo was not updated for 4 years, and is only known to work with Rails 2. (Although, the fork by cloudbees seems to be maintained well and it is indicated to work with Rails 3.)

The databasedotcom gem is a client for Database.com, allowing Rails to communicate with the service via REST API. I don't see any specific integration with Rails, so transferring data via API while keeping a local PostgreSQL database as some sort of cache seems to be the only way to go with it. (The management prefers using only one database.) Also, using SQL-like statements via the API while not using Rails' great database abstraction layer just looks like it'll be a painful headache during development.

There is a Database.com foreign data wrapper working with Multicorn for PostgreSQL. Sounds like it's ideal: just set the foreign data wrapper, export the data on Salesforce, and do everything else like usual. Rails wouldn't even know a thing. I'm just wondering if this is too good to be true, however.

The application is hosted on Amazon. (Why not Heroku, if they like Salesforce so much, right?) I'm still not confident about the differences between Salesforce and Database.com, so please bare with me.

Did anyone here had to deal with Salesforce as the database backend of Rails? Please let me know.

Thank you in advance!

Buying a custom/specialized engagement ring in the UK

Anonymous — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:50:03 -0800

My girlfriend would like a particular style of engagement ring. My girlfriend would like an engagement ring made in rose gold (a pinkish gold-copper alloy) with a red stone, preferably ruby or spinel, in a simple traditional style (plain metal, possibly a claw fitting)

I've had trouble finding a nice one ready-made. I've got preliminary quotes from various shops at Hatton Garden to get one made for £900, £1,300 and £1,900 depending on the stone quality. I could just about afford that, but it seems like a huge markup, since the gold can't cost more than about £100-£150, and there are similar but not-so-nice rings on Etsy for much less.

Does anyone have advice on finding such a ring, getting jewellery made in general, or recommendations for a jeweller who is in London or delivers to the UK?

What IT conferences should I budget this year?

The Supreme Dominar — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:50:01 -0800

What IT/programming/technology type conferences should I try to go to this year (June 2012 - June 2013)? I have to come up with a list of 3 by Thursday for my manager! I'm primarily a software developer who also does some OS X and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server management, and a little bit of Oracle administration (for a vendor app we use; most of my stuff stores its data in MySQL). What language I'm using on any given day depends on what platform I'm developing for:

OS X: C/Objective-C; perl for quick tasks
Linux: PHP, Java, and some Ruby on Rails; perl and bash for quick tasks
Windows: C# and some straight C/C++ with the bare Win32 API

A lot of what I write are "glue" or "integration" programs that help tie our various vendor apps together.

So beyond the obvious (WWDC), where should I go? In previous years I've been to YAPC and ApacheCon. I tried to go to RubyConf but missed the registration deadline (miscommunications on my part). I've been doing a lot of WordPress related stuff this year so a WP internals conference would be dandy (how to write plugins well). Also, if there's some good Oracle training that would be beneficial.

Budget is ~$3000 for registration, hotel, and travel. I work in Higher Education so anything with a bent towards that is good. Other than Oracle, the training type conferences where it's "Here's how to write programs in X language" don't interest me because I'm a good enough programmer to pickup any language I need to in short time. WRT language conferences I'm more interested in "Here's a framework you should be using. Here's major changes that are upcoming. Etc."

Ruby on Rails Resources?

ella wren — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 16:25:24 -0800

I'm working on learning Ruby on Rails right now, and I'm starting to feel like I'm in way over my head. For those who have been there, what resources helped you find your footing? So far, I've gone through the Rails for Zombies and TryRuby screencasts on Code School, plus the entirety of Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial. The latter was especially helpful in getting me more comfortable moving around in Rails, but now that I'm out of follow-along mode, I can do the basic stuff (create an app, add data, retrieve data, etc.) but I get stuck a lot.

For instance, right now I'm struggling with getting a has_many :through relationship to work by adding nested attributes within a form, and Googleing has turned up lots of options, but I can't get any to work in my application. Part of the problem for me is that Rails is so abstract - everything you do involves bits of code in about three different places, and I don't have a solid understanding of how they relate yet. What's doubly frustrating is that I know exactly how to do all this stuff in PHP/MySQL/HTML/Javascript, but the Ruby code just feels opaque. (I don't really have any programming experience, mostly front-end web stuff.)

I've only been at this for a couple weeks, so I suppose I shouldn't expect too much yet. There's a lot I really appreciate about Ruby and I'm willing to keep at it, but I need some good basic go-to resources. Can anyone recommend specific books or online tutorials (recent enough that they use Rails 3) that walk you through this stuff in a clear way?

Getting Ruby on Rails to work on IIS 7.5

cirrostratus — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 08:41:17 -0800

I've been tasked with moving a Ruby on Rails website from our ubuntu server that is being retired to a Windows 2008 server running IIS 7.5. Easy right? So far I haven't even been able to get a basic ruby test page to show up. I used Helicon Zoo to install Ruby on Rails and get a default application set up and a have a website pointing to that app but whenever I try to view I get a 500 server error. I should have all the needed gems installed. What do I have to do to even get the basic test page to show up?

I've gone through a handful of posts and threads on other sites about setting up Rails on IIS but so far none of them have really help. Most of this ruby stuff goes over my head as I'm normally just a PHP/WordPress developer and this is my first exposure to ruby. How do I proceed from here?

Ruby vs Java, which wins?

geoff. — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 14:22:07 -0800

How does Ruby compare to C#/Java in terms of speed of development, quality of code and long-term maintainability? A broad question, I know, but my focus is on enterprise applications that might pull in from several large data sources and might be rather large. I've played around with Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It seems like my gut is telling me that apples to apples, given the same project in Java or C#, I could get things done Ruby at least 1/3 quicker, and have just as high code quality and maintainability. It seems that the big barrier to doing this is that there's not that many good Ruby developers out there, so adding members to the team is going to be a challenge,

Is this really the only barrier? Has anyone out there done a large project, with multiple team members, in Ruby? I guess in my mind I'm seeing the leap from Java->Ruby the equivalent of C++->Java (I'm assuming that C#/.Net is near equivalent to Java in development time).

Again, I realize there's probably some performance issues, especially as sites get larger, but that's not really a problem I face. I'm more interested in that if you had two teams with the same amount of experience, tasked with building an e-commerce site from scratch, would you see one with a better work product at the end, or would it be about the same?

One of things that's spurred this is that while my gut says Ruby development is quicker, I've seen quite a few Ruby shops fail. Complete confirmation bias on my part, I realize, but it is still something I've seen.

Web app tutorials for rusty coders?

modernserf — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 08:12:43 -0800

How can I learn how to develop web apps? I took a few years of computer programming in school so I know the fundamentals of functional programming and the syntax for C-family languages. I remember the basics of object oriented design, and a little bit about memory management. I can do all the exercises in the Poignant guide to Ruby and Python the Hard Way without incident. I know enough HTML to throw together a GeoCities site, and I have a passing familiarity with CSS. I know next to nothing about dealing with servers. How can I turn my minimal and outdated knowledge into a useful and buzzword-compliant web app? What is the best resource to learn "how to build a basic CMS" the way that I learned how to make QBASIC play blackjack?

Decoding the question of the coder I need

Shepherd — Thu, 05 May 2011 11:21:29 -0800

What kind of Web programmer/coder do I need for this project? Where do I find such a person? I have an idea for a Web site; I'd like to invest a bit of money in getting it to the point where I can maybe take it to Kickstarter and really get it off the ground.

My Web skills begin and end with HTML and a bit of CSS. I tried learning some PHP once and got a nosebleed.

The nexus of the idea is a functionality where people can enter text in an entry page of the site; this text will then be re-presented on an aggregate page that shows lots of different texts, being entered by different people at different points on the globe, with everything updating in real time.

The "data entry" pages are simple and look like a straight-up text entry box.

So Person A in Nebraska can be typing an essay about water tables and agriculture;
Person B in Hong Kong can be typing a letter to his/her mother;
Person C in Toronto can be typing a film script;

and there's another page somewhere where you can see Window A, Window B, and Window C, and see the texts that Person A, B and C are entering in real time.

There’s a lot more to it, but that’s the core. I’m not trying to be maddeningly vague, but I also don’t want to explain the whole thing in a way that will be (a) nauseatingly long or (b) totally give it away. The engine of the concept is this "simulcasting" of text entered by multiple people at multiple points.

So... what kind of a Web programmer am I looking for? I know design is its own thing, but I really need to build the fundamentals of this so I can move on to proof-of-concept and then maybe Kickstarter. My programming knowledge is comprised of

10 PRINT "BUTT"
20 GOTO 10

... so I don't have the foggiest of what kind of subset of coder/programmer will best suit my needs.

And where's the best place to look? I need to start fleshing out a budget for this project, both for the initial phase and as a Kickstarter goal.

Monolingual no more

ixohoxi — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 12:01:45 -0800

I've been doing LAMP web development for about ten years. I'd like to learn a new language to diversify my skills. What language should I choose? Here's why I want to learn a new language:

1. I've heard it said that you can never really be a great programmer if you're just a "good PHP programmer", or a "good C++ programmer". That is: to really excel in any given language, it helps to be fluent in several other languages. This makes intuitive sense to me.

(PHP isn't the only language I've ever programmed in, but it's definitely the language I know the best.)

2. Curiosity. I enjoy learning new things.

3. I've often seen PHP criticized as an amateurish and poorly designed language, which encourages sloppy habits. I think some of this is just the partisan snobbery that always arises between rival technologies, but I can also see some of the points. PHP seems to be more a product of incremental evolution than intentional design.

I keep hearing that various other languages are cleaner, more elegant, more expressive, more scalable, more flexible, etc. I'd like to try them out for myself, and see what the hype is about.

4. Future employability. I'm more-or-less happily employed right now, but having a broader skill set will broaden my options in future job hunts. And I don't want to lock myself into one language, and find myself SOL when it falls out of fashion in ten or fifteen years and I'm too old to learn new tricks.

5. As a bonus, it would be cool to learn a language that will enable me to write desktop apps, not just web apps and scripts.

So, what language should I be learning? At least to begin, I'll be using it mainly for web stuff.

I've been dabbling (very lightly) with Python, and it seems pretty easy to learn. I'm also looking into Ruby. And I'm open to any other suggestions. (Except that I have zero interest in anything Microsofty.)

I'm intrigued by Lisp, but I'm not sure how much practical use there is for it (especially for the web), or whether it's just going to turn my brain into a pretzel. It seems best-loved by mathy / formal-comp-sci folks, and while I admire that world, I have no such background.

I prefer stronger typing, but that's not a requirement, and the trend these days (at least in the web-scripting world) seems to be toward loose typing.

If you have experience with PHP and the language you're recommending, please tell me why I'm going to love this new language. Bullet lists of language features are one thing—but I want to hear, in practical terms, why this language is better / easier / more powerful than PHP, and how those language features are going to help me build sexier web sites (and, perhaps, other kinds of applications).

Thanks!

Rapid Ruby on Rails indoctrination

(bb|[^b]{2}) — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:55:05 -0800

At year's end, I'm transitioning to a new web dev department that uses RoR extensively. Problem is, I've been a PHP/mySQL guy my whole working life. Help me bone up on my RoR, stat! So, all you RoR experts out there: pretend you're starting from scratch, with no prior Ruby or RoR experience. What would you do to get up to speed as quickly as possible. Here are some things to consider:

1. I'm near expert-level with PHP/mySQL, so programming isn't new to me.

2. It seems this is an ideal time to be asking this question since RoR 3.0 was just released. Should I focus primarily on 3.0 so I can be as relevant as possible, or do I need to backtrack and tackle one of the 2.* versions?

3. I'm not so naive to think that I can become a RoR whiz by Christmas. I realize that I won't be able to really hone my chops until I'm in the shit, working with the code every single day. I just don't want to be completely lost when they start throwing projects my way.

So, with those points in mind, where should I begin? Books, links, videos, online classes, whatever; lay it on me! The end goal is to be so saturated in RoR 3.0 that nothing will cross my desk that I can't tackle.

Thanks!

Best blog and news sites for web developers?

fogster — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:04:12 -0800

Are you a web developer who works with Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Apache, Linux, jQuery and so forth? What (professional) blogs and news sites do you read? I do web development in Rails for a small startup. For a long time, I've more or less worked in a vacuum, but I'd like to change that.

I have a long list of trashy blogs and news sites I frequent. I'd like to replace them with healthier choices -- things that will help expose me to new but relevant technologies, or just neat tricks with the technologies I already know. What sites do you recommend?

I am already fairly familiar with local user groups, mailing lists, and print media. I'm specifically interested in blogs and news sites that I could add to my web-surfing rotation.

Jaunty, Karmic, or Lucid???

pretzel — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 14:29:42 -0800

I want to set up Ruby on Rails development environment on my windows laptop at work, and plan to set up Virtual Box and install some version of linux, probably ubuntu, as a guest OS. I use windows mostly for work and OS X at home, but havent done much with linux (my office's production environment is linux, so I do a tiny bit). Which version of ubuntu should I go with right now? I see "Lucid Lynx" has just been released (I love the naming), should I go with that or a previous recent version?

Something is rotten in the state of Mogok

KathrynT — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:19:51 -0800

What's with all the cheap rubies on ebay? I occasionally browse loose gemstones for sale on ebay, not for any particular purpose, just because I like sparkly things. I've not done it in about a year, but this time through I'm noticing a LOT of really, really, really cheap rubies. Like, a dollar for a one-carat ruby. They all claim to be "natural," too, which has me suspicious; I know that lab rubies can be sold as "genuine" but I don't know about "natural."

These aren't really top-quality rubies; the color is good, or appears to be, but the clarity is so-so at best. Most of them say they've been treated by "lead-glass filling," which I know affects the value, but does it result in a markedly off-appearance stone? Because if the effect is pretty and permanent, I might buy a few just to satisfy my internal magpie. And what the heck is "chatham diffusion?" I know that the Chatham process is one method of making lab corundum, but what's with the diffusion?

Some of these stones are obviously lab origin at best; there's no such thing as an internally flawless ruby the size of a quail's egg for fifteen dollars no matter how you slice it. So my question is, are there new treatment methods that can turn industrial-grade ruby into kind of crappy gem-quality ruby? Are they using magic photography techniques to make the rubies appear markedly less shitty than they are? Are they lying and selling lab rubies as mined stones, or are they even corundum at all? Because right now I'm just straight-up puzzled.

Help me build a solid web design/development foundation from scratch

joshrholloway — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 15:00:19 -0800

I want to create a simple but dynamic Bible-reading web app from the ground up. I have very little web design and development experience. Where do I begin? I know that's a very tough question since there are probably dozens of different ways I could go about it. My understanding is that I'll probably need to learn (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP at a minimum. Maybe Ruby and SQL? I don't know, I'm really pretty clueless with anything more than basic HTML.

I've been reading HTML and CSS Web Standards Solutions: A Web Standardistas' Approach and I'm really enjoying it. I like that it explains what to do as well as why I'm doing it like no other tech book I've ever read. Any recommendations of books like it would be appreciated. I fortunately have access to pretty much any tech book you can imagine through Safari Bookshelf and university libraries. Visual tutorials of any kind are great also.

At this point it's just a side project and a hobby, so I can pace myself and learn as I need to. I'm really just doing it because I don't like any of the existing online Bible-reading tools and I figure it's as good a way as any to learn some basic web development and design skills so I can eventually move on to more complex projects.

So the question is in three parts:

1) What do I need to learn?

2) How should I start learning it?

3) Where do I go from there?

Thanks.

Tips for going from Ruby/Python to Java?

empath — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:47:51 -0800

I'm teaching myself to program. I learned the basics with Ruby on Rails, and I'm now coding in Python and Javascript, but I want to try an Android app, and that requires that I use Java. Going from Ruby to Python to Javascript was relatively painless, but I feel like I'm starting all over looking at Java code. Does anyone have any tips for going from scripted languages to Java? Or any really great tutorials for getting started in Java? Or any great tutorials for beginning programmers for Android?

Best programming language for a web design class?

satori_movement — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 17:07:22 -0800

What programming language should I teach my kids? (web dev) I've got about 20 interesting and enthusiastic highschool kids in a web design class. I'm having a blast teaching them, and so far we've covered some of the basics(html, css, and trappings of JS).

We're going to be on Javascript for a while, but at some point we're going to move on to a little database stuff and I want to be ready.

My own personal background is in PHP, but I've played with ruby and done a decent amount of work in python. I've also read that lua is a good choice, and there are some interesting MVCs in that area(plus Lua's syntax is similar to JS which I like).

Really though, I want to avoid running around in circles. So what programming language should I teach my kids? Lua, python, ruby, php, something else entirely?

Does anyone know the typeface/font used in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails logos?

MediaJunkie — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:35:26 -0800

Does anyone know the typeface/font used in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails logos?

How do I use data from data.gov?

Blandanomics — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:50:31 -0800

I'm a journalist with not much database programming experience. However I have been fascinated by the government and other agencies making their data available for developers to play with, and I think a newspaper could do wonders with this data. How do I get in on the fun? Transit agencies are making their times available the gov't just released records at data.gov.

What languages should I learn to manipulate these datasets to make some good applications and visualizations? Example I have in mind are the Guardians treatment of PM expenses and EveryBlock.

Should I learn Django, Ruby, Pyton? All? None?

Which forums do the best web programmers hang out at?

jackson5 — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:15:45 -0800

Which forums do the best web programmers hang out at? Long story short: I've got a web site that already does over 1 million pageviews per month. I've got a great idea to take it to the next level, but I'm looking for someone who can handle the coding and technical aspects in exchange for an equity stake.

I'm wanting to bring aboard a great programmer who doesn't necessarily need the work but will be motivated by the equity.

Which forums would you recommend I post on to find this person?

Also, if there's anyone interested here, let me know.