Wynn sat down with Nick Quaranto at Red Dirt Ruby Conference to talk about Gemcutter, RubyGems.org, and how to get started creating your own Ruby gem.
This week’s show is brought to you by GitHub Jobs
- Software Engineer at Asana lg.gd/aj
- Rails Software Engineer at CrowdTap lg.gd/am
- Software engineers at Secure Endpoints lg.gd/ak
Items mentioned in the show:
- Nick Quaranto, creator of Gemcutter which is now RubyGems.org
- Gemcutter is the Ruby community’s gem hosting service.
- Tom Preston-Warner, founder of GitHub
- RubyForge was the original spot to host your Ruby project.
- Peter Cooper, publisher of Ruby Inside and co-host of the Ruby Show.
- A gemspec is a manifest for a Ruby gem.
- Since a gemspec is saved as YAML, you can embed Ruby in it.
- Bundler manages a Ruby application’s dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably.
- Bundler 1.1 aims to speed up how gems are fetched.
- Jeweler and Hoe help you create, package, and release gems.
- Ryan Tomayko from GitHub tells us why “require ‘rubygems’” is wrong
- GitHub is no longer in the Gem building business.
- Erik Michaels-Ober uses the gem post install message to share resources with users.
- When not squashing Gemcutter bugs or applying patches, Nick likes to play with Redis and EventMachine.
Wynn sat down with Nick Quaranto at Red Dirt Ruby Conference to talk about Gemcutter, RubyGems.org, and how to get started creating your own Ruby gem.
This week’s show is brought to you by GitHub Jobs
- Software Engineer at Asana lg.gd/aj
- Rails Software Engineer at CrowdTap lg.gd/am
- Software engineers at Secure Endpoints lg.gd/ak
Items mentioned in the show:
- Nick Quaranto, creator of Gemcutter which is now RubyGems.org
- Gemcutter is the Ruby community’s gem hosting service.
- Tom Preston-Warner, founder of GitHub
- RubyForge was the original spot to host your Ruby project.
- Peter Cooper, publisher of Ruby Inside and co-host of the Ruby Show.
- A gemspec is a manifest for a Ruby gem.
- Since a gemspec is saved as YAML, you can embed Ruby in it.
- Bundler manages a Ruby application’s dependencies through its entire life across many machines systematically and repeatably.
- Bundler 1.1 aims to speed up how gems are fetched.
- Jeweler and Hoe help you create, package, and release gems.
- Ryan Tomayko from GitHub tells us why “require ‘rubygems’” is wrong
- GitHub is no longer in the Gem building business.
- Erik Michaels-Ober uses the gem post install message to share resources with users.
- When not squashing Gemcutter bugs or applying patches, Nick likes to play with Redis and EventMachine.
Git Is Simpler Than You Think
It was about one year ago that we switched to Git. Previously, we used Subversion, through the Mac app Versions, which (rightly) holds an Apple Design Award.
I made the executive decision to leave our comfy world of Versions because it seemed clear that Git was winning the Internet. There was much grumbling from my teammates, who were busy enough doing actual work thank you very much.
But I pressed forward. We signed up for accounts on Github. We learned how to type
'git push'and'git pull'. We became more confident. Git is just like any other source control system! But it wasn’t long before one of our devs called me over to look at a…situation.
The MFA Octopus: Four Questions About Creative Writing
MARK MCGURLFrank Conroy © Bruce Davidson
1. Why do people hate creative writing programs so much?
Well they don’t really, not everyone, or there wouldn’t be so many of them—hundreds. From modest beginnings in Iowa in the 1930’s, MFA programs have spread out across the land, coast to coast, sinking roots in the soil like an improbably invasive species of corn. Now, leaping the oceans, stalks have begun to sprout in countries all around the world, feeding the insatiable desire to be that mythical thing, a writer. Somebody must think they’re worth founding, funding, attending, teaching at.
But partly in reaction to their very numerousness, which runs afoul of traditional ideas about the necessary exclusivity of literary achievement, contempt for writing programs is pervasive, at least among the kind of people who think about them at all. In fact, I would say they are objects of their own Derangement Syndrome. Logically, any large-scale human endeavor will be the scene of a certain amount of mediocrity, and creative writing is no different, but here that mediocrity is taken as a sign of some profounder failure, some horrible and scandalous wrong turn in literary history. Under its spell, a set of otherwise fair questions about creative writing are not so much asked as always-already answered. No, writing cannot be taught. Yes, writing programs are a scam—a kind of Ponzi scheme. Yes, writing programs make all writers sound alike. Yes, they turn writers away from the “real world,” where the real stories are, fastening their gazes to their navels. No, MFA students do not learn anything truly valuable.
