perspective on skills: gregory brown
I'm going to guess that a lot of my .Net peeps don't know who Greg Brown is. He's is an active member of the Ruby community, and author, and all around good guy.
I first heard of Greg because of Prawn. It's a Ruby pdf library that Greg started, and is still my favorite pdf library for Ruby. Greg doesn't wait for other people to solve problems. He goes out and does it. ..then someone like me comes along and benefits from the stuff Greg wrote. (Thanks for Prawn!)
1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
I work in Ruby, using mostly boring standard tools, such as vim. I am using OS X, but only because I don't want to use Ubuntu and most other linux distros are a bit of a pain to set up on laptops. It does not matter much though, since I tend to use standard *nix tools that work everywhere. Homebrew has made installing those tools on OS X much easier, and is miles ahead of the previous attempts such as Macports and Fink.
No matter where I use Ruby, I try to use RVM. It is the only sensible way to work with multiple Ruby versions and implementations, IMO.
2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
I'm not comfortable qualifying those thoughts on a linear pro-neutral-anti scale. It's probably not that black and white. But here are some random thoughts that come to mind on the topic...
Like Google and Apple, I consider Microsoft to be a vastly oversized company that places its interests primarily on raking in money hand over fist. Unlike Google and Apple, Microsoft doesn't produce any software that I particularly like to use or have a need for in my day to day life. Also, unlike Google and Apple, Microsoft's attitude towards open source still lags significantly behind modern practices.
That said, I think the guys who work on Excel are absolute champs. This is only because a big part of my consulting work over the years has been helping people write more robust solutions to crazy hard problems they managed to mostly solve in Excel. It is amazing what adept Excel users can accomplish, even if they take the tool far beyond what it should reasonably be used for, and that's a testament to what a powerful tool it is.
Also, Microsoft does some amazing skunkworks project in all sorts of weird areas, but I sort of wish the folks working on those projects would do their research independently to increase the chance their ideas would actually see the light of day.
3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
I like working in open source communities because they tend to be hot spots for people who care about software freedom and the free culture movement in general.
I like working in Ruby because it mostly gets out of my way and lets me get things done. There are probably many languages I can do that in, but Ruby seems to work best for my brain.
4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
Consulting work has treated me very well over the years, but I do not live for commercial work. I focus on building great stuff and that seems to have worked out and kept my bills paid.
5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
I am not very interested in tools, to be honest. Better tools and a mastery of those tools will improve your productivity, but it won't make you any better at figuring out the right problems to solve or the right way to solve them.
Sorry, I'm sure that's not the answer that you were looking for, but I suppose it's worth representing, because developers tend to emphasize tools so much. Tools do matter, but much less than many other more important things.
I will say that I like that my entire toolchain is trivial to set up on any platform, and gracefully degrades to the point where I can code productively over a SSH session. This meant a lot more to me when I was switching between Linux, OS X, and Windows frequently, but even without that I like the independence from the underlying platform that my tools provide me.
6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
[did not answer]
7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
I am the founder of a free school for software developers, Mendicant University. It's a really great community and though we reach a relatively small amount of people directly through our courses, we're working on a lot of ways to reach the community at large, so folks should keep an eye on what we're up to.
Folks should also check out my Practicing Ruby newsletter. I've recently began work on the second volume of it, and the first volume was extremely well received by the community.
Lastly, I'm @seacreature on twitter. Following me there is the best way to keep up with whatever my latest projects happen to be.
Gregory Brown
practicing ruby | @seacreature
I'd consider Greg a philanthropist. Not the rich guy in the movies or tv giving out loads of money, but a guy committed to community giving of his own time. I'd recommend hiring him, but I'm not sure if he works like that now. It's worth asking him though. That is, in between free Ruby training sessions with Mendicant.
UPDATE: Greg claims to have quit twitter.
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I first heard of Greg because of Prawn. It's a Ruby pdf library that Greg started, and is still my favorite pdf library for Ruby. Greg doesn't wait for other people to solve problems. He goes out and does it. ..then someone like me comes along and benefits from the stuff Greg wrote. (Thanks for Prawn!)
1. What are your normal toolsets and coding environment? Meaning what language, IDE, and OS do you use most of the time; and anything else that comes to mind.
I work in Ruby, using mostly boring standard tools, such as vim. I am using OS X, but only because I don't want to use Ubuntu and most other linux distros are a bit of a pain to set up on laptops. It does not matter much though, since I tend to use standard *nix tools that work everywhere. Homebrew has made installing those tools on OS X much easier, and is miles ahead of the previous attempts such as Macports and Fink.
No matter where I use Ruby, I try to use RVM. It is the only sensible way to work with multiple Ruby versions and implementations, IMO.
2. Would you consider yourself pro-Microsoft, anti-Microsoft, or neutral? Why?
I'm not comfortable qualifying those thoughts on a linear pro-neutral-anti scale. It's probably not that black and white. But here are some random thoughts that come to mind on the topic...
Like Google and Apple, I consider Microsoft to be a vastly oversized company that places its interests primarily on raking in money hand over fist. Unlike Google and Apple, Microsoft doesn't produce any software that I particularly like to use or have a need for in my day to day life. Also, unlike Google and Apple, Microsoft's attitude towards open source still lags significantly behind modern practices.
That said, I think the guys who work on Excel are absolute champs. This is only because a big part of my consulting work over the years has been helping people write more robust solutions to crazy hard problems they managed to mostly solve in Excel. It is amazing what adept Excel users can accomplish, even if they take the tool far beyond what it should reasonably be used for, and that's a testament to what a powerful tool it is.
Also, Microsoft does some amazing skunkworks project in all sorts of weird areas, but I sort of wish the folks working on those projects would do their research independently to increase the chance their ideas would actually see the light of day.
3. What personal decisions or thoughts led to your current coding preferences?
I like working in open source communities because they tend to be hot spots for people who care about software freedom and the free culture movement in general.
I like working in Ruby because it mostly gets out of my way and lets me get things done. There are probably many languages I can do that in, but Ruby seems to work best for my brain.
4. If there was some business motivation, could you briefly explain it?
Consulting work has treated me very well over the years, but I do not live for commercial work. I focus on building great stuff and that seems to have worked out and kept my bills paid.
5. What are the best points of your current coding environment?
I am not very interested in tools, to be honest. Better tools and a mastery of those tools will improve your productivity, but it won't make you any better at figuring out the right problems to solve or the right way to solve them.
Sorry, I'm sure that's not the answer that you were looking for, but I suppose it's worth representing, because developers tend to emphasize tools so much. Tools do matter, but much less than many other more important things.
I will say that I like that my entire toolchain is trivial to set up on any platform, and gracefully degrades to the point where I can code productively over a SSH session. This meant a lot more to me when I was switching between Linux, OS X, and Windows frequently, but even without that I like the independence from the underlying platform that my tools provide me.
6. If applicable: What if anything do you miss from your previous coding environment?
[did not answer]
7. Anything else you want to mention or promote?
I am the founder of a free school for software developers, Mendicant University. It's a really great community and though we reach a relatively small amount of people directly through our courses, we're working on a lot of ways to reach the community at large, so folks should keep an eye on what we're up to.
Folks should also check out my Practicing Ruby newsletter. I've recently began work on the second volume of it, and the first volume was extremely well received by the community.
Lastly, I'm @seacreature on twitter. Following me there is the best way to keep up with whatever my latest projects happen to be.
Gregory Brown
practicing ruby | @seacreature
I'd consider Greg a philanthropist. Not the rich guy in the movies or tv giving out loads of money, but a guy committed to community giving of his own time. I'd recommend hiring him, but I'm not sure if he works like that now. It's worth asking him though. That is, in between free Ruby training sessions with Mendicant.
UPDATE: Greg claims to have quit twitter.