Weeknote 2024-08

Spent the first part of the week writing a lecture I’m giving to some undergraduates CS students in Sheffield next week. Partly an origin story of Ruby/Rails and how they’ve evolved; partly about what it’s like to have a 17 year (and counting) career in Ruby, and partly about what cool things are happening in the Ruby interpreter land.

It’s the first time I’ve given a lecture, for like an hour, and the process of writing one is very different to a 20 minute conference talk.

If someone had told me when I was an undergrad, that one day I’d be standing up there talking about my career in language development I’d have probably laughed them out of the building. But here we are.

New project has got off to a steaming start. I’ve been mostly writing technical documentation and getting all the planning shenanigans off the ground. But also pairing with Aaron and Eileen to get some integrations with the Ruby build system kicked off. The main lesson this week is that Ruby’s build system is very complex and I really really don’t like Autotools based build systems very much.

I hadn’t given them that much thought before - I generally just had to configure; make; make install, with the occasional quick fix, or patch here and there when adding or moving header files around.

But now that I’m actually delving into integrating a completely new DSO into a very old and already complex build system I’m not enjoying myself that much.

I’d like to write about Ruby’s build system in more detail some time, but I haven’t got time right now so that one’s going to join the long list.