Ryan Tomayko

Book Review: Coders at Work —

A quote from Brad Fitzpatrick:

I find that is the best way to start a conversation. If you get on a mailing list and you are like ‘hey I want to add feature X’ the maintainer is probably going to be like: ‘ Oh fuck, I am so busy, go away, I hate feature X’. But if you come to them and you are like ‘I want to add feature X. I was thinking something like the attached patch’ which is totally wrong but you say, ‘But I think its totally wrong. I am thinking the right way might be to do X’ which is some more complex way, generally they will be like ‘Holly crap, they tried and look, they totally did it the wrong way. Maybe that pains the maintainer. They are like ‘ Oh man, I can’t believe they went through all that effort to do it. Its so easy to do the right thing,’ and then they reply.

This is the secret to being productive when contributing to open source. It’s very rare that you should approach a mailing list without a patch of some kind.

"In practice, nothing works." —

From the apparently just published, Coders at Work (Apress, 2009), Brad Fitzpatrick Talks About Programming:

In practice, nothing works. There are all these beautiful abstractions that are backed by shit. The implementations of libraries that look like they could be beautiful are shit. And so if you’re the one responsible for the cost of buying servers, or reliability – if you’re on call for pages – it helps to actually know what’s going on under the covers and not trust everyone else’s library, and code, and interfaces. (…)

They should have titled the book, “In Practice, Nothing Works”. Anyway, you can grab the — ick — PDF ebook for $20 on Apress.

The Ruby Programming Language —

Yukihiro (Matz) Matsumoto, David Flanagan, _why the lucky stiff, David A. Black, Charles Oliver Nutter, and Shyouhei Urabe: that’s what I call a writing team. Wow.

Udell Interviews Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby on "RESTful Web Services" —

Ugghh, this is 7 days old now and I still haven’t had a chance to listen… It’s the best interview ever when I imagine it in my head :)

RESTful Web Services (Paperback) : by Leonard Richardson, Sam Ruby [amazon.com] —

A site for sore eyes :)

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel —

Aaron Swartz reviews a newish book on Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Insanely good topic, bad book?

"A Horse Named Paul Revere," a children's book by The Beastie Boys —

All hail the king adrock.

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby —

Holy crap this is the coolest language book I’ve ever seen. No seriously, you have to flip through the chapters – there’s regular comic strips and other crazy non-sense.

Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman —

Holy crap a new Feynman book! Published by his daughter.

Dracula Blogged —

Bram Stroker’s Dracula blogged based on dates in the book. This will run for the next six months. Subscribed.

The Naked Ape : A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal —

This book is excellent. B&N and Borders keep telling me it’s out of print.

Practical Common Lisp —

Looks like a lot of real-world stuff in here and is also very recent.

How to Kill a Mockingbird - The Book Report —

I forgot about the burning shark!

Neal Stephenson's System of the World concludes the Baroque Trilogy —

Doctorow with a short review of the Baroque Cycle.

1984 —

Orwell’s masterpiece in all the beauty of text/plain. Note: this isn’t public domain in the US but is in AU.

Slashdot | Dive Into Python Book Review —

Congrats Mark!

The Underground History of American Education —

Entire book online. Looks like evidence of some huge educational conspiracy.

Teach Yourself Emacs in 24 Hours —

Free book on picking up Emacs.

Hacking Mac OS X Panther —

Sample chapters from book I need to buy.

Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks [safari.oreailly.com] —

“..this book is your guide to figuring out the BSD Unix system and Panther-specific components that you may find challenging.”

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python