Hi, I’m Andrew

On 11th September 2017, I spoke at the London Ruby Users Group about the modern Java ecosystem. I had left the Java world around a decade before, and had bad memories of writing lots of verbose boilerplate code. When I moved to being a Ruby developer, I left all of this behind, and never thought I’d go back. On a recent project, however, I was exposed to modern Java, which now has lambdas, and lots of nice syntactic sugar. On top of that, the Spring framework and the accompanying ecosystem had lots of the features I had been looking for when considering moving to a microservices architeture. ...

On 8th June 2015 I gave a talk to the London Ruby Users Group entitled Ruby Magic. For this talk, I recreated several popular magic tricks in Ruby, including cups and balls, turning water into wine, and sawing a person in half. I then told the audience how the tricks were done, by including a gem I wrote in my .irbrc file. This magic_set gem monkey patches core Ruby classes like String and Array. The purpose of this talk was to demonstrate some of the unexpected behaviour you can get if you extend classes Ruby’s core classes, something I strongly advise against. ...

On Tuesday evening, I gave a 20 slide ’lightning talk’ at the London Ruby Users Group (LRUG) entitled “Ruby Poetry”. Inspired by Murray Steele’s “My First Ruby” talk at a previous LRUG, I decided to tell a story about a small progam I wrote about five years ago, when I was fairly new to Ruby. At the time, I had just made the transition to Ruby after years as Java developer, and I was amazed at how easy it was to solve problems without having to write very much code. ...

On 23rd June 2011, I gave a talk at the Hacker News London meetup group on how we ’eat our own dogfood’ at Tribesports by integrating fitness and exercise into our work day. Video: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/2395-dogfooding Slides: https://github.com/andrewmcdonough/presentation-dogfood

On 9th May 2011, I ran a coding competition at the London Ruby Users Group. People were asked to form teams of 4-8 people, and solve nine short ruby golf ‘holes’ using as few characters as possible. Each hole was defined by a set of RSpec examples describing a single method, and the teams had to write the method to pass all of the examples. The team with all tests passing using the fewest number of charaters would be declared the winner. ...

Update (2019) I wrote this post in 2010, and this project won’t work anymore. Recently, I have been consuming a lot of music through Spotify, a desktop application that gives you instant access to millions of songs. As well as listening to music at home, I try to go to as many live gigs as possible. Living in London, there are so many touring bands to chose from that it is sometimes difficu lt to keep track. For the last year or so, I have been helped by Songkick.com, a fantastic online database and community for live music fans. Through the site, you can track your favourite artists, receive email notifications when they are playing near you, and mark any gigs you are going to (which in turn gets fed into my Google Calendar so I don’t forget). When I go to a gig, I like to listen to the music of the performer beforehand, which I usually do using Spotify. I find, however, that I frequently forget to do this, and end up not enjoying the gig as much. ...

Update (2019) I wrote this post in 2009. In 2019 I believe my approach is a terrible idea. Adding methods to Ruby’s core classes (like String) is asking for trouble. The logger is a really useful way to tell what is going on in your ruby application, but in Rails, it can be difficult to spot your own log entries when they are mixed up with all the ActiveRecord and ActionController ones. One way of making your own comments stand out is to use color in your logs. You have probably noticed that Rails does this already to make the logs more reada ble, and the effect is fairly easy to replicate yourself. Color in the terminal is achieved using ANSI escape codes, a series of characters to tell the terminal to print the enclosed string in a particular color and style. You could just include this in your logs yourself, but this ends up looking a bit messy. To solve this, I extended String to include a method called colorize. It takes a color (“gray”,“red”, “green”, “yellow”, “blue”, “magenta”, “cyan”,“white”) and a few other optional parameters for styling. ...

It’s easy to let your email get on top of you. Fortunately, since I moved to Gmail for my domain, it has been to be a lot easier to avoid being overcome by an overcrowded inbox. For the last year or so, I have been trying to implement Inbox Zero, a system that I first heard about from productivity expert Merlin Mann. It involves processing your inbox regularly and moving all emails to a trusted place where they can be processed later. After a single pass, your inbox should be empty. ...