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After seeing him speak and meeting him a couple times I’m a big fan of Adrian’s work. He was one of the first people to “mash up” google maps at chicagocrime.org; has set the bar for local online media content at lawrence.com; created the Congressional Votes Database at the washingtonpost which allows you to (among other things) get an RSS feed for your representatives votes; and has created probably the most popular web framework for python.

But the thing that really impresses me the most about him is how he mixes the role of technologist and journalist. If you are curious take a look at the commencement speech he just gave at his alma matter, University of Missouri’s School of Journalism. Now if you work in/for a libraries/archives (which is likely given this blogs focus) just substitute ‘journalism’ for ‘libraries’ as you read the piece. You may be surprised to learn that the field of Journalism finds itself in much the same dire straits that Librarianship is in:

Then there’s this whole Internet thing — which is clearly evil. Some guy in San Francisco runs a Web site, Craigslist, that lets anybody post a classified ad for free — completely bypassing the newspaper classifieds and, therefore, chipping away at one of newspapers’ most important sources of revenue. Why would I post a classified ad in a newspaper, which charges me money for a tiny ad in which I’m forced to use funky abbreviations just to fit within the word limit, when I can post a free ad to Craigslist, with no space limitation and the ability to post photos, maps and links? Google lets anybody place an ad on search results. Why would I, the consumer, place an ad on TV, radio or in a newspaper, if I can do the same on Google for less money and arguably more reach?

Ahem, Google Scholar or Amazon anyone?

The foundation that you got here is important because it will guide you for the rest of your journalism career. It’s important because, no matter what you do in this industry, it all comes back to that foundation. No matter how the industry changes, no matter how your jobs may change, it all comes back to the core journalism values you’ve learned here at Missouri.

But, most of all, the foundation is important because you need to understand the rules before you can break them. And now, more than ever, this industry needs to break some rules.

…

You’re going to be the people breaking the rules. You’re going to be the people inventing new ones. You’ll be the person who says, “Hey, let’s try this new way of getting our journalism out to the public.” You’ll be the PR person who says, “Let’s try this new way of public relations that takes advantage of the Internet.” You’ll be the photographer who says, “Wow, quite a few amateur photographers are posting their photos online. Let’s try to incorporate that into our journalism somehow.”

…

So think about how exciting that is. Rarely is an entire industry in a position such that it needs to completely reinvent itself.

What are the rules of the library profession that we need to break? In my conversations with fellow library technologists we often talk about how the profession needs to be advanced, like we are uniquely effected by the massive changes in media/information in the last 10 years. I think we should draw some comfort from the fact that we’re not the only ones dealing with this new terrain–as we kick ourselves in the pants. Perhaps some new professions are being born out of this melange.

Adrian is the type of professional I’d like to be, that’s for sure.

In case you missed it, or aren’t subscribed the chicago-ruby group is getting together for a Selenium demo/sprint session on Dec 13th. I’ve seen Selenium demo’d before at a chipy meeting, and look forward to a more in depth look since several of my friends really like this testing tool. I think Jason is particularly interested in getting some Ruby driver support.

I managed to attend Snakes and Rubies yesterday where Adrian Holovaty and David Heinemeier Hansson talked about their respective web frameworks: Django and Rails.

The event started at 2PM and went to 6:30PM or so, and was attended by over 100 people! I watched this little event take shape out of the mists of the local python and ruby mailing lists and was just amazed to see how vibrant the Chicago software development scene is, or has become in the 3 years I’ve lived in the area.

What’s more Adrian and David did a great job promoting both of their projects, while remaining amiable and respectful of the other camp. It’s hard to imagine a similar event between two commercial frameworks. Both were given about 45 minutes or so to talk about their software in any way they wanted. They both had extremely different yet effective presentation styles, and their projects had one important thing in common: disillusionment with PHP.

Rather than talking technical details Adrian spent most of his time focused on how Django came to be down in Kansas at lawrence.com. lawrence.com began it’s life as a PHP application which served as a community site for all sorts of goings on in Lawrence, Kansas. The site interleaved all sorts of local entertainment content: music, dining, art, movies…and it encouraged user participation. For example you can listen to mp3s from local musicians, but here’s the twist, you listen to them as they are playing in town…so if you like a song you can jump over to the venue later that week to see them live. Another example was a full on sports site for the local little leagues which posted details of games, scores, weather conditions, etc. All of this was detailed to show how deeply intertwined all the data was.

The really interesting stuff for me was when Adrian described how journalism informed his software development practices…and how Django fed into this process. In the same way that journalists work against the clock to get news stories out quickly and accurately Adrian and his team worked to get software projects done often on similar deadlines (sometimes like 4 hours). They quickly found that their PHP infrastructure wasn’t allowing them to respond quickly enough without introducing side effects, and decided that they needed new tools…which is how Django was born. In fact the little league application mentioned above was the first Django application.

Adrian has since moved on to the Washington Post, where he is their resident web technology mad scientist. Apparently they are using Django in some form at the Post, or are planning to since he mentioned Django’s caching can scale to the 9 million odd requests the Post gets in a single day.

Unfortunately my lead pencil ran out of lead just a bit of the way into David’s talk, so I don’t have as much written down from the Rails presentation. David dropped some wonderful one liners that I wish I could have written down. Much unlike Adrian, David let actual code do most of the talking for him.

Early on he had a screen with a quote from Richard Feynman on the importance of finding beautiful solutions to problems (if you remember the quote please let me know). This quote kind of guided the rest of the talk where David showed off beautiful Model, View and Controller code from RubyOnRails…and it really was beautiful stuff. David’s thesis was that beautiful things make you happy, and happiness makes you more productive…so beautiful code will make for happy, productive programmers. Much of this comes back to the essential philosophy of Ruby–to give joy to programmers. At any rate, the lights were dimmed and David gave us a tour of what RubyOnRails code looks like, while highlighting some of the strengths of the project and the Ruby language. On one of the pages there was some code to set a cookie expiration, and the date was created like so:

   20.years.from_now

How cool is that! I wasn’t sure if this was part of Ruby proper until I fired up my ruby interpreter to check:

biblio:~ ed$ irb
irb(main):001:0> 20.years.from_now
NoMethodError: undefined method `years' for 20:Fixnum
        from (irb):1

Whereas from the Rails console it works fine:

biblio:~/Projects/cheap ed$ script/console 
Loading development environment.
>> 20.years.from_now
=> Thu Dec 04 15:38:48 CST 2025

So Rails decorates the Fixnum class with the years method. Pretty awesome :-) Another thing David highlighted was that Ruby is used everywhere, from configuration, to writing XML, to writing JavaScript. I was even surprised to hear him argue for full on Ruby in view templates. His argument is that even when a framework offers only a limited set of tags, it’s still offering logic, and rather than creating some bastardized tag language why not just use tried and true Ruby.

The two presentations were followed by a few (not many) moderated questions, and some questions from the audience. The highlight for me was when Why the Lucky Stiff’s question was asked:

Looking a bit beyond web frameworks, how do you envision the world coming to an end?

David responded by “scoping” the world to mean the world of software development and said that this world would come to an end if the layers of Java “sedimentation” continue to accrue. He went on to predict that we’re at a crossroads in software development, and that a paradigm shift is underway…intentionally provocative, and pretty much right on as far as web development goes if you ask me. Adrian responded “Yoko Ono”.

So, as you can tell I’m still digesting the presentations and discussion. There was so much good stuff, and I was really struck by the collegiality between the two guys: open source software development at its finest. The two main things I took away were embracing the boundaries between software development and a particular industry like Journalism, or in my case Libraries; and always trying to strive for the beautiful in software, “boiling down” a thorny problem into its most simple and elegant expression.

Last night I took the train into ThoughtWorks to check out the Chicago Area Ruby Group meeting. There wasn’t a planned talk, so I wasn’t sure what to expect (apart from getting a chance to chat with Jason and Chris). One thing I definitely didn’t expect was seeing close to 30 people there.

The room we met in was kind of an atrium type of space. Everyone arranged themselves into a circle, and at the center of the room there was a smaller table with 6 chairs. After everyone went round an introduced themselves the function of the central table was revealed by Joe O’Brien who got everyone to play this discussion game called fishbowl. Basically there are 6 seats, and any 5 people can sit in them at any time (always leaving one chair open). People start talking about stuff, and if at any point someone wants to join the discussion then they sit down in the empty seat, and someone who no longer wants to talk can get up and leave. At all times the 5 seats needed to stay filled.

This fishbowl actually worked out really well. The conversation ranged from ruby’s performance, to comparisons with java, rails, the community, the “Ruby Way”, joy, and practical examples of Ruby in the workplace. All in all it was a very pleasant meeting, and it was really interesting to see a good cross section of Chicago technology in an informal environment. Afterwards Jason, Chris and I went and had a few drinks at a nearby bar with Sam Stephenson and Marcel Molina of 37Signals. Sam and Marcel are both core developers for the Rails project, and recently moved to Chicago to join 37Signals. Sam is the developer behind prototype which I’ve been meaning to learn more about. Hopefully Sam can be coerced into doing a prototype talk at some point.

It’s been interesting watching local perl, python, ruby and java groups and how they regard each other. Chris mentioned that it’s unfortunate when discussion borders on digging at the other guy, and that the real thing that unites these groups is that everyone enjoys programming, and works on stuff on their own time. If the focus could brought to be that level I think there could very well be occasional cross language meetings. I mentioned to John Long that perhaps a meeting about javascript could bring folks from other languages together. He had a great idea of having someone like Sam talk about javascript, and then break off into smaller groups that talked about integration with various languages. Anyhow it was well worth the train ride in. Thanks for putting up with me being away for an evening Kesa :-)