Jesse's posterous

UML vs. Rails' Simplicity

Yesterday I was working through a conceptually difficult relationship between my Rails models. After sitting at the keyboard and pulling my hair for a few minutes I went to the whiteboard where I could lay things out and get a better overview of the situation.

!!

Having taken a course on Software Engineering at University, my first instinct was to use UML and pictures to represent the situation I wanted and transcribe it to code later. But since I'm using Rails it was actually easier to just write the code. I just wrote something like this:

<script src="http://gist.github.com/84174.js" ></script>

It's funny that UML exists as a pseudo-language on top of other programming languages, so that people, technical and non-technical, can talk about these things and you can have a shorthand for defining relations between models etc. without having to actually write code.

I love how Rails circumvented a lot of that by just making the framework so simple. The way I talk about Rails code at a high level is the same way that I actually implement it in code form.

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Environmentally Friendly Image Search

Recently I was looking for some stock images on Google Image Search
and wasn't finding what I wanted. So I searched for other image search
engines and found "Picsearch":http://picsearch.com.

 Not only did it give me better results but they are apparently the
"first search engine to go carbon
neutral":http://about.picsearch.com/p_releases/the-worlds-first-carbon-free-search-engine/.

 Here is their 4 step program:

 # Picsearch plants 1000 new trees for every gigawatt-hour consumed.
# Picsearch buys and holds in trust 2 acres of old growth forest for
every gigawatt-hour consumed.
# Picsearch only uses electricity that is carbon free and follows the
highest standard of production.
# Picsearch buys carbon credits equivalent to all energy that
Picsearch consumes.

 So next time Google Images isn't finding what you are after, try a
"friendly alternative":http://picsearch.com.

The Beginning...

Hey,

Whaddya know? My first blog post.

This is coming to you live from Shopify. The best in e-commerce and evidently a solid blogging platform as well.

I'm really liking the Vostok theme I went with for this blog, not bad eh.

Anyway, stay tuned as I hope to be bringing more actual content to this blog in the near future. I have some OSS ideas floating around my brain that I would like to make a reality and I hope to expand on some of the stuff I have been writing for NETTUTS, and that stuff will all be found in one place, here.

Jesse