Hanging out with friends

We always have a strong contingent of Bmore on Rails folks at RubyNation. This weekend I twice received unsolicited praise that the Bmore on Rails group was “friendly and cohesive” and “one of the more fun local groups”. I’m paraphrasing, but it was awesome to hear that others see us this way. It’s true!

Making new friends

I can’t even count how many colleagues I’ve met at previous RubyNations! I don’t feel like I met too many new folks this year, but it’s still a big part of any local conference to me. If you met me (or even if you didn’t), make sure to keep in touch on twitter!

The Talks

I was lucky, I had already seen three of the sessions at Bmore on Rails in the last few months (“Fat Models Aren’t Enough” by Jeff Casimir, “Confident Code” by Avdi Grimm, and “KnowSQL: Database Tricks to Make Your Life Easier” by Nick Gauthier). This made it easy for me to see a couple of new talks.

“Git: It’s All About the Trees, Baby” by Scott Chacon

Scott obviously knows git inside and out. The details are complex, and I’m mystified about it on a regular basis, even though I’ve been using it for over 3 years. I love how Scott slows down to ask, “Does that make sense?” after every difficult concept. I took feverish notes and re-read them a few times – after some digestion, yes, Scott, now it does make sense. I think. slides

“Make Awesome Command Line Applications in Ruby” by David Copeland

For some reason, this topic speaks to me. Maybe it was all the shell scripts I wrote early in my career, or my love for the “UNIX way” of building large systems from many small tools. This was one of those talks that probably snuck under the radar, but those who were there know that they took away a ton of knowledge. I’m looking forward to David’s upcoming PragProg book on the subject! slides

“Search-Friendly Web Development” by Luigi Montanez

It must be tough to be the first session of day 2 of a conference (wait, it is). I wonder how many people were scared off by the thought of this being an “SEO” talk? Well, it was. And it was excellent. To web developers, SEO doesn’t have to be much more than checking off a few boxes. Really – it’s not crazy difficult. Luigi laid out a great plan to help your site be more successful: by optimizing crawling, indexing and ranking. I’ve been forced to learn a ton about this subject while working on replyz.com – we have a footprint of close to 10 million urls, so managing searchability and the sitemaps has been one of my jobs for close to a year. Great job, Luigi! slides

“The JavaScript Renaissance” by Chris Williams

Chris is a showman. Did he really hand out 200 pirate hats? When his speakers weren’t loud enough, did he really voice-over the Numb3rs episode where they explain IRC? And did he really convince a room full of Rubyists that their favorite language has strong competition from other programming languages? Yep.

“Must. Try. Harder.” by Keavy McMinn

Every conference needs at least one inspirational talk. And this one fit the bill perfectly. Keavy’s even-paced delivery and detailed descriptions of the agonies of triathlon training provided a great analogy to our software development careers. The video of the harrowing descent left the room silent for a full minute and a half. Well done!

Jeff Casimir setting up his gear to take headshots

Jeff is the coolest. He gives a brief lightning talk imploring everyone to use their face as their avatar, not a cartoon or a logo. Then he invites everyone to step out into the lobby where he has set up a temporary studio – complete with a backdrop and two remote flashes. Fifty people stepped up and got their photo taken, and Jeff posted the results to flickr the next morning. The next morning. Seriously, this guy is awesome. By the way, are you looking for Ruby or Rails training? Check out Jumpstart Lab. (Also, why are so many folks afraid to step in front of a camera? You know we all can see you right now, right?)

“Your code is awesome. Your copy sucks.”

I love lightning talks – you never know what you’re gonna get, and the investment is low (5 minutes). This year my favorite was about copy writing (that’s the stuff between the tags that the user sees). Andrea from corgibytes let the uber-techie, male-dominated audience know that the words you write matter. I play the role of copy writer for a few minutes (!) every week, and I appreciate raising awareness about this under-appreciated skill.

The Hacking

There was considerably less code hacking this year – but we still fit some in. Paul Barry wrote a Ruby chat server in the few minutes leading up to Nick Gauthier’s talk. And I told Andy Atkinson my idea for listing members on bmoreonrails.org, and he ran with it and started the feature! (hopefully we’ll have members listed on the site this week)

The Party

Github sponsored the drinks, Living Social sponsored the food. And it was at a Westin. Do I need to say more? If you were there, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the mini-burgers (I thought they were the coolest things ever).

My Conclusion

It was another fun local conference. Congrats to Gray Herter and David Keener and David Bock, and everyone else who organizes RubyNation every year. Keep in mind that these were my favorite parts of RubyNation – yours will most likely be different. What did you enjoy most about the conference? What did I miss?

So if you just need some basic git, just to get by, this post is for you. Note that this just glosses over the basic commands, you’ll want to use the man pages and resources on the web such as the free book Pro Git to learn more.

git clone

This makes a copy of the passed repository and puts it on your machine. Note that git clone will create the directory called ‘ext-extensions’ for you. This is the first step to working with an established repository.

$ git clone git@github.com:jjulian/ext-extensions.git

git stat

git diff

git stat tell you the current status – what files have changed. And git diff will show you a line by line diff of every file that has changed. Pipe it’s output to your favorite editor, or to a pager like less.

git commit

$ git commit -m "added this new feature" ext-extensions.js

git push

Use git push to send all your commits to the origin server. If you don’t want to send them all, then commit some on a different branch from ‘master’. (this is not hard, but a bit more advanced. Look up git branch and git checkout).

$ git push origin master

git pull

Use git pull to integrate changes from another git repo into yours. Similar format as git push.

$ git pull origin master

Armed and dangerous

Armed with the above commands, and a git expert nearby, I guarantee you’ll be able to survive the day only bothering them once or twice. Here are more tips to keep you going:

git add

You can batch your commits to git. Use git add to queue up a bunch of files (or directories) and then commit them all at once using git commit. Very helpful. With this usage, do not specify files on the command line. If you use git add, you also need to use…

git diff –cached

the –cached param to diff tells it to diff against the version pending commit, not the version on disk. This can get you in trouble, so before you commit ‘added’ files, make sure you have not changed them since the add (of course, this is a feature as well, as you can keep modifying a file but then only commit the original changes. It can get confusing, so just don’t do it.).

git checkout — path/to/file.txt

You’ve made some changes to a file, maybe lot’s of changes, and it’s all crap. You just want to pull the latest version from the repo and forget you even edited it. This works alot like svn revert.

These are the commands I use every day. There are some more: git log, git merge, git mv, git rm, git reset, git show, git blame…but I’ll save these for part 2. The basics are enough to allow a user without too much scm experience to survive changing code and committing files. There’s plenty of info available on the web for any git situation you may find yourself in, don’t be afraid, jump on in!

svn revert file.rb

In git, you don’t add that file to your staging area for commit. To make your changes go away forever, you checkout a new copy of that file from HEAD.

git checkout -- file.rb

If you omit the –, it will still work, as long as you don’t have a branch named the same as your file. Thanks to Jonathan Dance at norbauer.com – one of the few blog entries I found describing this technique.

2009-04-28 UPDATE – err has a great git cheatsheet that includes this trick under Fixing Mistakes.