Saturday, May 31, 2008

Migration: Change the file name fix the pain?

So I'm watching the keynote by Jeremy Kepler and he had struggles... everyone does... with rails migrations. Sadly the big answer to our woes with migrations was changing the identifier on the front of the file name from a incrementing integer to a time stamp. Well I'm not going to dog on the change because I've thought it was obvious and needed, but why in the world are we putting that time stamp at the front of the file? We name our migrations for a reason and perhaps it's just my love of the command line but I want to use what I've named it instead of trying to get the time stamp associated with a migration before hitting tab. So we could argue about storing the names in the database table for migrations and all that jazz, but its such a simple patch to put the time stamp at the end of the file. Well that's what I'll do. With arguably the nicest string manipulation methods in any standard library I think I can pull off the ever complicated reverse! method I'll have to use to do it.

Rails = Success; Me = Failure

It's been forever and a half... which I've been recently told that the world will end in 2038 so I guess it's not that long. I've decided to stop letting better be the enemy of good on this blog and just write stuff. We'll see what people can get out of it. I fully intend to finish the meta-programming guide in ruby ASAP as exposure at rails conf has lead me to believe that it is desperately needed.

This years rails conf (Portland, OR) has been great so far. DHH gave a keynote that I very much appreciated last night on doing something else with your life, and taking advantage of the surplus of time we have as rails developers (while it lasts) to improve who we are as programmers and people.

Avi Bryant has done some incredible work with stacking ruby on top of smalltalk technology. He and Gemstone gave an incredibly promising presentation yesterday. (Maglev)

Last night I caught the last MAX (1:13 AM) back to my hotel. Well worth it though. I hosted a "Semantics on Rails" birds of a feather session and there were some fantastic people there. I'm certainly more motivated to fix, finish, and for the love of sammy sosa write specs for ActiveSesame... which may soon be known as "Angular Cat."

Tonight we're going to have a semantic hack fest after the Science 2.0 BoF. I hope to get some junk done before then.