I was wondering if using Twitter in a software development team would be useful. Twitter is a pretty unobtrusive application. Messages just show up and it's very easy to disregard the messages if they do not pertain or interest you. If the message does interest you, you can easily follow up with the person using a more traditional communication tool.
For a development team, I thought it would be useful to know what other developers are working on or have accomplished. There may be times when you could help each other out or would be aware if someone is going down the wrong path or has solved a problem that you couldn't.
I think it could be a good tool. Right now I'm on a project with another developer. We're going to try using Twitter to communicate "stuff". I'm hoping that we will be able to tweak our Twitters to be beneficial to each other over time. I'll post my findings on the Twitter Experiment. Let me know if anyone out there has already tried this or something similar or if you have any suggestions of things we should try out.
Showing posts with label Programming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Programming. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Thursday, March 20, 2008
First Cut of Ruby
I wrote my first Ruby app yesterday. I've been meaning to do this for years but I finally did it....I was stuck at 87% for quite a while there.
Anyway, I like learning new things and like most people I find that if I use it to write an application that I am interested in, it makes learning a lot easier, more fun, and I think I learn more.
So here is an overview of my application and some things that I learned along the way. If anyone is interested in the code, leave a comment and I'll send or post it.
MLB Stat Scraper
The application basically grabs stats from a website and puts it into a text file. The reason that I wanted this was so that I would be able to look up preseason stats without having to be online. I could just print it out and take it with me. I would also not have to go to 30 team pages and cut and paste them all manually (it takes longer than you think).
I ended up using a Ruby HTML parser library called Hpricot to help me find the text that I was looking for. It worked really well once I figured out how to use RubyGems to install it. In retrospect, I didn't need Hpricot since the stats that I was looking for was placed between pre tags and was marked in such a way that I think I could have got the text with the standard Ruby libraries.
I also used JRuby instead of Ruby and that seemed to work fine as well. There were some snags when I was installing RubyGems and Hpricot for JRuby, but it all eventually worked.
I'll get into the reasons for JRuby in a later post.
Ruby Impressions
I'm liking Ruby. I need to understand how things work a whole lot better, but it did what I wanted with very minimal code. The bulk of the code was less than 20 lines and after getting everything installed it took maybe an hour or so of total time to write.
Anyway, I like learning new things and like most people I find that if I use it to write an application that I am interested in, it makes learning a lot easier, more fun, and I think I learn more.
So here is an overview of my application and some things that I learned along the way. If anyone is interested in the code, leave a comment and I'll send or post it.
MLB Stat Scraper
The application basically grabs stats from a website and puts it into a text file. The reason that I wanted this was so that I would be able to look up preseason stats without having to be online. I could just print it out and take it with me. I would also not have to go to 30 team pages and cut and paste them all manually (it takes longer than you think).
I ended up using a Ruby HTML parser library called Hpricot to help me find the text that I was looking for. It worked really well once I figured out how to use RubyGems to install it. In retrospect, I didn't need Hpricot since the stats that I was looking for was placed between pre tags and was marked in such a way that I think I could have got the text with the standard Ruby libraries.
I also used JRuby instead of Ruby and that seemed to work fine as well. There were some snags when I was installing RubyGems and Hpricot for JRuby, but it all eventually worked.
I'll get into the reasons for JRuby in a later post.
Ruby Impressions
I'm liking Ruby. I need to understand how things work a whole lot better, but it did what I wanted with very minimal code. The bulk of the code was less than 20 lines and after getting everything installed it took maybe an hour or so of total time to write.
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