Ooochie: A Ruby Developer’s Journal

1 year, 10 months, and 21 days ago, I walked in to the Integrum offices for my first day of work. I had no prior professional experience and I was scared out of my mind. I have recently decided to leave Integrum to pursue other opportunities (which I will write about soon), so tomorrow is my last day at Integrum. I thought it appropriate to publicly say goodbye, and more importantly, thanks, to all who influenced my time there.

I was so surprised when I received the email from Jade originally offering me a job. With my lack of experience, I never expected it, and I will always be grateful for the opportunity I was given. To Jade - It was a leap of faith to hire me and believe in me, and I can only hope I've made it a worthwhile choice.

Through all the changes I've seen the company go through, the best part about working at Integrum has always been it's people. I could not have asked for better coworkers - you guys are such intelligent people with incredible ideas and potential to do big things. I owe each and every one of you a huge thank you for making me the software developer I am today, not to mention the person I am today.

I'm not good at goodbyes, but what I'm really trying to say is: Thanks and I <3 you guys. Remember to <3 each other, and I wish the best of luck to all of you. :)

At the beginning of the year, the Integrum team compiled a list of company goals for 2008. One of our goals was to participate in a charity event in order to give back to the community. On June 7th, the Integrum team will be participating in Big Brothers Big Sisters annual Bowl for Kids Sake event.

If you'd like to help us reach our goal, please visit my page or our team page to donate online. Every little bit counts, and we really appreciate your support!

I can't really believe I'm saying this, but as of today I have been working at Integrum for one whole year. It's true what they say you know, time really does fly when you're having fun! Last year around this time, I was starting to have serious doubts about my choice of degree, thinking that I might not ever find a job in my field that did not involve a cubicle or a serious lack of human interaction. But then, a craigslist ad and an interview later, I was starting my first day at Integrum.

I had some serious anxiety about going in there that day. But now, a year later, I can say it was one of the best decisions I've ever made. I have had the opportunity to work with and learn from some extremely talented people, and have had tons of fun doing it.

So anyway, a big thanks to the Integrum gang for just being awesome. :)

At Integrum, we do "tech-talks" every Tuesday and Thursday. A member of the team gives a short presentation about something technical so as to share his or her knowledge with everyone else. I personally enjoy these talks because it gives me an extra opportunity to learn cool stuff from my oh-so-brilliant co-workers.

This past Tuesday, it was my turn to present during tech-talk time. I never know what to talk about, so when Josh suggested that I talk about Runt, I ran with it. Last week I was introduced Runt while trying to incorporate recurring events into a project. Runt is a gem that implements recurring event patterns as described in a paper by Martin Fowler. It allows you to easily define a temporal expression, which represents a set of dates and/or times that an event will occur.

The basic idea is to define a temporal expression using one or many of Runt's temporal expression classes and then use the include? method to ask the expression if it includes a particular date. In the example below, I created a temporal expression for an event that happens every week on Thursday.

I definitely recommend taking a look at Runt if you need to work with recurring events. Below are the slides from my presentation, and here is the rubyforge site for Runt.

So I figure that I might as well jump right into the blogging thing while its hot. Last weekend I had the opportunity to attend RailsConf in Portland, Oregon, with several of the guys from Integrum. (Special thanks to the boss-man, Jade Meskill, for giving me the chance to come along). I'm really glad I went, mostly because it gave me such perspective into the phenomenon that is rails. I was introduced to ruby/rails back in December when I started at Integrum. I had no experience actually using either one, so I jumped right into learning as much as I could as fast as I could. I have really enjoyed working with rails the last 6 months, but I never realized that there was such community and passion behind it. I am proud to be a part of that kind of community. At RailsConf I attended several interesting talks, and I will try and post about some of them when I get the chance to sort through my notes. To get a play-by-play of Integrum's RailsConf Experience, visit Derek's blog.