Freelancing Gods 2010

Update: I’ve now hit my target. If you want to donate more, I won’t turn you away, but perhaps you should send those funds to other worthy open source projects, or a local charity. A massive thank you to all who have pitched in to the pledgie, your generosity and support is amazing.

Over the past two years, Thinking Sphinx has grown massively – in lines of code, in the numbers of users, in complexity, in time required to support it. I’m regularly amazed and touched by the recommendations I see on Twitter, and the feedback I get in conversations. The fact that there’s been almost one hundred contributors is staggering.

It’s not all fun and games, though… there’s still plenty of features that can be added, and bugs to be fixed, and documentation to write. So, what I’d really like to do is spend November working close to full-time on just Thinking Sphinx. I have a long task list. All I need is a bit of financial help to cover living expenses.

I have an existing pledgie tied to the GitHub project, currently sitting on $600. If I can get another $2000, then I won’t have to worry at all about how I’m going to pay bills or rent for November. Even $1400 will make it viable for me, albeit maybe with some help from my savings.

If you or your workplace can make a donation, that would be very much appreciated. I’m happy to provide weekly updates on where things are at if people request it – but of course, watching the GitHub projects for Thinking Sphinx itself and the documentation site is the most reliable way to keep an eye on my progress.

I’m hoping to get Thinking Sphinx to a point where the documentation is by far the best place for support, and it’s only the really tricky problems (and bug reports) that end up in my inbox.

I want it to be a model Ruby library that doesn’t get in your way, is as fast as possible, and plays nicely with other libraries.

I want the testing suite to be rock-solid. I’ve been much better at writing tests first over the last six months, and using Cucumber has made the test suite so much more reliable, but there’s still some way to go.

This is not a rewrite – it’s polishing.

I’ve been toying with this idea for a while, and it’s time to have a stab at it. Hopefully you can provide some assistance to do this.

In case you’ve not booked your ticket yet, but were considering coming and needed one more reason: I’ll be giving a tutorial on Sphinx at RailsConf in Las Vegas next month. To get 15% discount, use the code ‘RC09FOS’. (O’Reilly seem to hand out codes everywhere. If you paid full price this time, keep that in mind for next year.)

If you will be there, I’m more than happy to have a chat – about Sphinx or anything else – so let me know if you want to meet up.

Crowdsourced Research

For those of you who know Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx already, I’d love to hear about the things you found a bit difficult when learning. What are the topics I should make sure I cover in my tutorial, that are maybe lacking in documentation?

A quick note to let anyone using (or interested in using) Sphinx and/or Thinking Sphinx that my Peepcode PDF has just been published, and contains a wealth of information on how to mix Sphinx with ActiveRecord (via Rails or Merb).

It’s been great working with Geoffrey Grosenbach to get this written up, and I’m pretty stoked to see the final results – hopefully others will enjoy it as well.

Also, a massive thank you to all the contributors to Thinking Sphinx – it wouldn’t be quite so cool if it wasn’t for all the patches (facilitated by GitHub’s forking).

A quick question to fellow coders…

Unsurprisingly, there’s a dearth of Ruby developers in Cambodia. I imagine the situation is pretty similar in other developing nations. PHP and Visual Basic seem to be the common languages in the small tech community here.

I’m currently working on building a website for one of the local NGOs here – and of course, Rails is my preferred framework. But looking forward, I don’t wish to be providing ongoing support for the site – and the client shares that sentiment. So to make it easier for local developers to take over, should I be considering using PHP for the project instead?

I have offered to help the IT guy at this organisation learn Ruby, but he won’t be there forever as well. And they’re a small NGO – they don’t have the cash to throw around hiring super-skilled developers. The project itself is pro-bono.

So, what would you do, given the circumstances?

(And for the record, it’s very likely I’ll stick with Ruby – using the Radiant CMS – but I’m interested in others’ opinions.)

A few random items:

• There’s a Rails Camp happening in Denmark. How awesome is that!?
• I’ve added an About Me page to this blog – filled with opinions. You have been warned.
• I’m talking at NYC Ignite – come along and listen to me talk quickly about non-Ruby stuff for five minutes, if you’re near that part of the world.
• Joss Whedon is awesome.
• So is Pixar. You must see Wall-E. Easily the best film I’ve seen all year.

Following in the steps of the Australian Rails Camps, it’s now time to announce the first UK edition. Running from Friday the 15th to Monday the 18th of August, it will be an extended weekend of hacking, talking, eating, drinking and games, with a bunch of smart and passionate Ruby developers.

Even though the name is “Rails Camp”, previous camps have included talks on topics from Merb to Rack to Extreme Programming – all topics somewhat related to Ruby are welcome.

If you’d like to come along, I’d recommend registering soon, as there’s a very limited number of places.

I’ve just started my round-the-world conferences-and-holiday adventure, and the first stop is RailsConf in Portland – so if you’re in town and see me wandering around looking rather cluelessly, please say hi.

Also, in case you’re on the Twitter bandwagon, you’ll find me with the creative nickname of pat.

In case you’ve not been watching every commit carefully flow through Thinking Sphinx on GitHub – PostgreSQL support has been added. I’ve done a little bit of testing, and I’ve had some excellent support from Björn Andreasson and Tim Riley, so I feel it’s ready for people to start kicking the tires.

I’m no PostgreSQL expert – I definitely fall into the n00b category – so if you think there’s better ways to do what I’m doing, would love to hear them.

If you’re a Ruby developer in or near Australia, I highly recommend attending RailsCamp number 3, which has just opened for registration. The first two were simply amazing, so I’m just a little annoyed that I can’t make it to this one (as I’ll be traveling overseas at the time). I’ve no doubt that this one will be just as fantastic – expect an extended weekend of hacking and talking with a bunch of smart, entertaining and passionate developers, and plenty of drinks and games thrown in for good measure.

You don’t need to be a Rails or Ruby genius to attend – just a desire to discuss, learn, teach and (most importantly) have fun.

Go register now.

Another small sphinx-related post.

In line with the first release candidate release of Sphinx 0.9.8 last week, I’ve updated both my API, Riddle, and my plugin, Thinking Sphinx, to support it. Also, for those inclined, you can now get Riddle as a gem.

I’m slowly making progress on some major changes to Thinking Sphinx, so hopefully I’ll have something cool to show people soon. Oh, but some features that aren’t reflected in the documentation: most of Sphinx’s search options can be passed through when you call Model.search – including :group_by, :group_function, :field_weights, :sort_mode, etc. Consider it an exercise for the reader to figure out the details until I get around to improving the docs.

Today was the first time I’d come across Ruby’s undef_method – it’s used in a few places in Rails, particularly with ActiveRecord’s associations. While I see the point of it, there were a few methods I wanted back – and I’ve figured out how to do it – you need to grab the method definition from the superclass. Here’s an example:

class AntiString
  undef_method to_s
end

AntiString.new.to_s
  #=> NameError: undefined method `to_s' for class `AntiString'

AntiString.send(:define_method, :to_s,
  AntiString.superclass.instance_method(:to_s))

AntiString.new.to_s #=> "#<AntiString:0x364ef8>"

Now, the obvious caveat – if the method was originally defined in that class, not the superclass, then I think you’re out of luck. Although I’m guessing you’ll rarely be in a position where you need to resurrect a method like this anyway.

For one of the contracts I’m working on at the moment, I’ve been using Merb to construct a web service that interacts with MYOB, and can be consumed with ActiveResource.

The connection to MYOB is ugly, using Christian Werner’s ODBC Bindings and the Rails/ActiveRecord ODBC Adapter, the latter of which had to be hacked slightly. However, the Merb side of things was quite clean. I’m really looking forward to seeing how Merb progresses, especially with their plans for merb_core and merb_more.

One of the rare snippets of code from the Merb app that I think is more verbose than the Rails equivalent is how to go about obtaining the query parameters (as opposed to routing parameters) of a request.

The Rails way:

request.query_parameters

The Merb way:

params.except *request.route_params.keys.collect { |key| key.to_s }

Also, in case you’re as stupid as I am and want to generate Merb controllers on the fly, you can’t use Class.new. The only way is by building the class in a string and eval’ing it:

Object.send(:eval, <<-CODE
class ::Object::#{controller_name} < Application
  # actions and such go here
end
CODE
)

It’s not particularly elegant, but at least it works.

Short post, as befitting the importance of the content: Riddle and Thinking Sphinx have both been updated to support the current version of Sphinx, 0.9.8r1065.

Another quick Sphinx post – Riddle is updated to support Sphinx’s latest release (0.9.8r985), and Thinking Sphinx now has that new version of Riddle as well.

I’ve not tested any of this with the recently released Ruby 1.9 yet, though (but it’s on my list of things to do).

Also, thank-you to Joost Hietbrink (again) and Jonathan Conway for their patches to Thinking Sphinx – very much appreciated.

Rails code snippet for the day: validates_uniqueness_of_set. Useful for making sure each specific combination of the specified attributes is unique. Example from the pastie:

validates_uniqueness_of_set :first_name, :last_name

Just like the options it accepts, the code is very similar to validates_uniqueness_of – and the few tests I’ve thrown at it are handled without any problems.

RailsCamp 2.0 finished earlier today – and I think it’s safe to declare it a fantastic success (even given my bias).

Massive thanks to Ben and Karen for their hard work getting everyone fed and co-ordinating people in the kitchen (and the RailsCamp bus from Melbourne to Sunnystones). Thanks too to everyone who helped at various points – both in the organising and over the weekend.

Finally, thank you to everyone who came along – these camps are so much fun because of the calibre of people who attend, and their willingness to share ideas, code and laughs.

Will be posting a version of my talk at some point soon… once I’ve recovered from the weekend.