The video of my Golden Gate Ruby Conference talk, Gilding the Rose: Refactoring Legacy Code, is now up on Confreaks. I hope you enjoy it!

One of the things I enjoy is building tools that support my team and make us all more productive.

My recent talk at GoGaRuCo is about refactoring legacy code. The talk is based on the Gilded Rose code kata, which is a really fun kata to try. I highly recommend setting aside a few hours to play with it. There are variants of the kata in a number of different languages.

Last week, I attended the last-ever Golden Gate Ruby Conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers announced at the conference that this is the last year for this conference.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at RubyConf 2014, November 17-19 in San Diego. I’ll be presenting “Affordances in Programming Languages”, an updated version of the talk I did at Mountain West Ruby Conference earlier this year.

In recent years, I’ve seen several people decide to switch to Emacs. There seem to be two or three compelling reasons that cause people to go through the temporary slow-down of making this change:

I recently ran across this quote from C.S Lewis:

I recently ran into an interesting design challenge involving the Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) idiom and the Composite design pattern.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been spending most of my time writing a new application in C++. Normally, my C++ work is on applications that have been around for a while, so doing something greenfield has been a refreshing change. Almost all of my C++ work these days is on Linux, but this new application initially needs to run on Windows. We want to move it to Linux eventually, and we like to do most of our development in Linux, so we decided to make the application cross-platform right away.

Object-oriented languages typically support some form of inheritance.