PragDave

Announcing a new beta of Deploying Rails, or why e-mail is dead

Yesterday we released the second beta of the Deploying Rails Applications book. It has a new chapter on Windows-based deployment, and includes updates now that Capistrano 2.0 is out.

Our new online system automatically sent e-mails to all existing owners, telling them about the beta.

And all but a few hundred of these e-mails were deleted by our commercial STMP service—the vast majority never reached their intended recipients. Apparently all the commercial e-mail hosting companies are now afraid of being tagged as "bulk-mailers," and will detect folks sending large numbers of emails in a given period.

All of which sucks.

Something our customers have asked for is better notification of updates to PDFs. The new site delivers. When you log in, it tells you if any of your PDFs have been updated. You can subscribe to your personal RSS feed and receive a notification that way. But most people seem to want to receive e-mail notifications. And now, just when we get into a position to be able to do that automatically, we seem to be blocked.

So, a question. We're not a big company. We don't have the resources to be able to manage the intricacies of mass emailing in-house. And we want something automated—we need to be able to send potentially many thousands of slightly-customized emails out when a PDF gets updated. And we need to be able to do it programmatically. Does anyone know of a decent solution?

Thanks.

A Little Ruby

Back in 2001, when Ruby was still largely unknown, Brian Marick started work on a book about Ruby, and about thinking in Ruby. Called A Little Ruby, a Lot of Objects, it is styled after The Little Lisper. It's quirky, but also surprisingly deep.

Now Brian is wonder whether to revive the project. Check it out, and then let him know.

Ruby and Leopard

Leopard comes out today, and with it comes a whole lot of Ruby goodness. Ruby 1.8.6, with a bunch of gems installed (including Rails), Joyent's dtrace support, Ruby Cocoa (bridged to most of the Leopard system frameworks), Xcode integration, Scripting, and more. Read about it over on MacOSforge.

Art in Programming

Andy and I gave a talk a JAOO a few years back called The Art n Programming. Since then, I've been giving variants around the world, talking about the ways in which developers can learn from artists (and, along the way, how we should avoid the false dichotomy of art vs. engineering).

David Troy came up to me after and said that he'd heard that the Museum of Modern Art in New York might be featuring two of his Rails applications in an exhibition.

Now it's official: Twittervision and Flickrvision will be on display next year.

In his blog announcement, David says:

Today, creativity and imagination (what some folks are calling the right brain) are becoming the key drivers of software and design. With imagination, we can see around the corners of today's most pressing challenges. While technical skill is certainly valuable, if it's applied to the wrong problems, it's wasted effort.

Creativity, imagination, and artistry help us identify the areas where we should put our efforts. They help us see things in new ways.

Hear hear! I like to think of it as bringing balance back to a process that for too long has been seen as some poor bastard child of mathematics and engineering.

Software development is neither. Nor is it art. It's just software development. People who look for the "software is like xxx" analogies are missing the point. Software develpment is like software development. Let's decide what works for us, and have fun while doing it.