Danny’s Blog

Sherry has never been my favorite drink. Not only does it have unpleasant connotations: of England, the 1950s, Agatha Christie, brown, dull, mouldy; or worse, in Holland: where in the 1970s desperate housewives got drunk on cheap supermarket sherry — but also I just never liked the taste of it very much.
The last time M. […]

After writing the post about exclamation mark methods in Ruby yesterday evening, I couldn’t get to sleep (lesson learned: don’t go straight to bed after blogging). My mind was still churning away over the whole issue. And just before I fell asleep, in the short period of time when a lucid state of geniality bordering […]

When I first read (in Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby) about Ruby having ‘destructive’ methods, I couldn’t think why such a redundancy would be necessary in a language. Destructive methods are those ending with an exclamation mark; they are called destructive because they may change the instance its operating on. Take for example the String#gsub […]

Normally I prefer trying to write an original text of my own; but in this case I can’t help but pass the word. This post thought the words out loud right out of my mouth: Reuse is vastly overrated, by Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson. Quote:
Reuse only works well when the particular instances are so […]

I’m not so good at saying goodbyes, so the end of a long term project always brings me mixed feelings: I’m eager to take on something new, start afresh, meet new people, tackle new problems — but I hate saying goodbye to the team of people I’ve been working with so closely, people I’ve seen […]

In a recent post, Stuart Halloway wrote that his company bids up to 50% lower for projects done with Rails, compared to similar Java projects. For applications ‘nowhere near the Rails sweet spot’ they still bid 10% lower. So the question arises: what is that sweet spot? For what projects would you rather choose Rails […]

It just took me less than half an hour to upgrade to WordPress 2.0, the latest version of the blogging software I’m using. I’m impressed with backwards compatibility. Unfortunately, the Textile plugin (which enables you to format text without HTML tags) does not seem to work properly anymore, so mosts of my previous posts are […]

Someone on our (Java) project team has so fallen for Ruby that he is now trying to force the Java code into Rubyesque patterns. He has found an ally for this in the Commons Collections Closure interface. What he seems to want to do in Java is the equivalent of:
sum = 0
list.each { |item| sum […]

Beginning bloggers can often be recognized by their fixation on web server statistics. I don’t mind admitting that I’m no exception. It’s just as satisfying to see that people read my ramblings, as it is to see people use a computer program that I wrote. Besides, the stats can show you some very interesting information, […]

As a child, I was first introduced to French cheese by the man behind the counter in our local grocery store. He offered my mom and me a slice of Brie on a cracker. It wasn’t the best of acquaintances. I wasn’t a big fan of (Dutch) cheese to begin with, and this was just […]