Tarkblog

Just a quick announcement that my second book is now available:

http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ctelec/index.html

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A Peek at Computer Electronics

Are you a programmer or computer enthusiast? Do you feel comfortable with methods, functions, and variables? Do you wish you knew more about how the computer made it all work? Now you can. From basic electronics to advanced computer hardware, you’ll learn the magic behind the gear that makes it all run.

If you’re into tinkering, or ever thought about it, this book explains the basics of how it all works.

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My first book is still available too:

http://pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/ctrubyqt/index.html

KDE.news has posted an interview with me about our company’s business decision to use Linux and KDE in our testing environment. The interview was actually conducted over a year ago, but stagnated due to lack of time to post it. It was revived a few weeks ago and I updated some of the information to say more about what we are doing now.

While it’s KDE centric, note that we make heavy use also of Gentoo Linux, Ruby, QtRuby and Ruby on Rails all for our test stands.

In particular, if anyone in the Ruby community is looking to get some specifics or metrics for our use of Ruby in the enterprise I’d be happy to share that information.

I don’t really have the desire right now to be an independent consultant. I have the background, and I think I have the contacts, but I really like what I do and enjoy coming to work everyday.

That said, I was thinking the other day about if I was able to work from home on an 8-5 schedule doing the programming thing. I’m pretty structured, so I would definitely spend most of my time working in front of the computer.

But that got me thinking: if I did do that, could I pull off doing it while actually working another job? One thing that came to mind was from my middle school/high school days. They had a teacher who did nothing but supervise study hall. This person got paid to sit in a room all day and, for the most part, do nothing but read.

I thought: wouldn’t that be the perfect job for someone who worked on programming all day? First off, you get the whole summer off from it. And secondly, you get 95% of the day to yourself anyway. You could double dip and make some extra money while you were doing your main consulting job.

Someone out there who works for yourself: please try this and tell me if it works. I’m very curious to know.

I’ve started a Writeboard to keep track of people who will be coming to the Chicago Rails studio. We’d like to try and get a meetup together, probably for the night before the workshop starts.

Email me : caleb at AAA EEE III dash tech dot com (that’s aei-tech.com) for an invite.

UPDATED: Mike Clark says to hold on just a minute and we’ll all be getting invites to a more formalized system shortly.

I added Camping to the Gentoo portage tree today. It’s a micro Rails app, basically performing the same style of function (and MVC based web framework), but in a much smaller footprint.

Check it out.