This weekend, during my wife’s birthday celebrations, I talked with someone about my recent programming exploits, including how much fun I’m having programming web applications in Ruby on Rails. The response:
“Sure, Ruby’s fun, but it’s not really useful. It’s a cute scripting language, but it can’t scale.”
Until recently, this was an opinion that I agreed with. Hell, it was actually something I told other people.
One day, I realized why I agreed with it.
Now it’s just an opinion that makes me want to smack someone.

I’ve been turned on to JetBrains’ RubyMine quite a bit lately. Despite my affinity for more “old school” development environments like Emacs (which I used for many years in my former development life), I’ve really been enjoying working with RubyMine. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s winning my most recent “Screw this IDE crap, I’m going back to a text editor!” self-battle.
Still, we could always improve, and there’s one particular improvement that would be a dream come true for me (and insure that, following my 30 day trial, I actually …

Pivotal Tracker does one thing: It Rocks. Last year when Morgan introduced me to this agile project management system, I was blown away. It’s a testament to the philosophy of “Do one single thing, and do it really freakin’ well.”
Now, they’ve gotten better with the release of version 3 of their API:
This Pivotal Tracker update allows you to see GitHub or other SCM commits in your stories, your project activity in your team’s Campfire chat room, and introduces the first wave of integrations with other bug/issue tracking applications including JIRA, …