{ StevenHaddox.com }

FYI: I tried to list these in order of preference / desire.

Books I already own

Ruby:

• Programming Ruby 1.9 (the “pickaxe” book)
• The RSpec Book (beta)
• The Ruby Way (2nd ed.)
• The Well Grounded Rubyist
• Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby || (online / free PDF)
• Ruby Best Practices || (slowly releasing free online)
• Enterprise Recipes with Ruby and Rails
• Textmate (I’m a big Mac fan)

Rails:

• Agile Web Development with Rails (2nd ed. - get the 3rd ed. in my wishlist)
• The Rails Way
• Advanced Rails Recipes
• Flex on Rails
• RailsSpace (online via Safari)
  

My “Wishlist”

Ruby:

• Design Patterns in Ruby
• Best of Ruby Quiz
• Mr. Neighborly’s Humble Little Ruby Book || (online / free PDF)
• Scripted GUI Testing with Ruby
• Everyday Scripting with Ruby

Rails:

• Rails 3 in Action
• Agile Web Development with Rails (3rd ed.)
• Security on Rails
• Rails 3 in a Nutshell
• Payment Processing with Paypal and Ruby

So I’ve had several friends and coworkers join Twitter or ask about Twitter as of late. As a result I decided to write a quick blog from my #iPhone while I’m watching an episode of #SVU and laptopless.

First things first, several different sites use different terminology about Twitter. From what I can tell the most commonly used terminology is as follows:

Tweet: A new message posted to Twitter (eg: ‘That tweet by @sunnythaper was hilarious!’)
Retweet (RT): Prefixing ‘RT’ or ‘Retweet’ in front of a tweet of importance to you allows you to give credit to the original author (eg: RT @sunnythaper: Nobody’s beard is as cool as mine. Not even @santaclaus).
Overheard (OH): If something is particularly hilarious to you that someone else said you can overhear it (eg: OH: @sunnythaper, unless it’s about the KKK on twitter I’m good!)
@username: Prefixing a username with the @ symbol (usually at the beginning of the tweet) is a public reply in response to another person’s tweet (eg: @sunnythaper Are we still on for sushi next Tuesday?)
Direct Message (DM): A direct message is used to send a private message to another user. To send a direct message to a user prefix the username with a ‘d’ and a space (eg: d sunnythaper Do you mind if I use your Twitter handle for examples in a blog post about Twitter?)

Once you get the basic usage down you’ll find that Twitter can be very useful, relaxing, hilarious, time-consuming, productive, or any combination of the above. No matter what how you use Twitter you may want to find easier ways to interface with it than just twitter.com/home. Personally I use Twitterific on my Macs and iPhone (although I use TwitFon for my second phone application and I’ve heard Tweetie is amazing on the iPhone). There are tons of desktop clients but Tweetdeck seems to be the most common for cross-platform use as it runs on Adobe Air and is very customizable. You’ll probably want to look around and see what works best for you.

So what’s the point in investing all this time into learning all of these use-cases, learning the new terminology, and picking up yet another social networking tool? That’s entirely up to you. Twitter is what you make of it. For me Twitter is a way to keep in touch with my friends and find new ones (real or virtual). It’s a way to share and get ideas for activities and projects. It’s a way to follow great thinkers in web development and hence the newest trends. It’s a way to help others and in turn seek help on that stupid CSS bug I’m banging my head against the desk on.

What’s with the #hashtags earlier in the post you ask? Well hashtags are just one of the cool things about Twitter. They aren’t actually part of Twitter itself, but like all good things on the web as of late, they extend Twitter’s API over at www.hashtags.org and show you all tweets from users that have the same hashtag. Many third party Twitter clients support hashtags and automatically link to the appropriate URL to show you other tweets.

If you’re a developer you can find out how to extend Twitter by looking at their API.

Hopefully this post has helped to serve as a very basic introduction to Twitter and how it can be of use to you. If you haven’t yet, you’re more than welcome to follow me at: http://www.twitter.com/stevenhaddox

Also a special thanks to Sunny (http://www.twitter.com/sunnythaper) for letting me use his handle in my examples. If you’re looking for someone humorous to follow, he’s even more funny than I am serious ;)

I thought that it might be time to give an update.  I have been very busy over with the agile evangelists at Integrum Technologies and have been loving every minute of all the things I’ve managed to absorb in the past few months.  My conversion to Rails has been drastically better than my past experience of learning other languages.  Within weeks I felt confident enough to start my own side projects and dive head-first into things that I used to wait months to fully understand how to do with previous conversions.

I have come to gain a very solid appreciation of AJAX, as long as it is done unobtrusively. I’ve also come to love the purpose and structure that a good MVC framework can provide.  I’ve come to swear by TextMate.  I can’t imagine managing a web project again without it.  I’ve found that pair programming provides amazing benefits that can never be guessed at until you’ve tried it yourself. I’ve found that my errors and refactoring due to pair programming have been exponentially improved and that my development style in general has become more efficent, more detailed, and more well-thought than in the past (in much less time).  I’ve also found that agile methodology as a method of software development just makes sense (for me at least).  Software (especially web based applications or sites) are constantly changing in their requirements, goals, needs, and acceptence criteria.  Agile methodology ties in perfectly with this dynamic lifestyle of software growth.

As to the other things that I’ve been up to, well I’ve started at least three side-projects Read the rest of this entry »

I just posted the following as a comment on a blog as to why I already purchased the iPhone 3G. I thought it might be appropriate to share on my blog as well. Enjoy.

---

I’ll try to keep this short and simple, but don’t be surprised if you get a short novel. I am a little offended that the beginning of this post [original blog linked above] begins with such bias as to say that if Steve Jobs branded a sandwich with the Apple logo a line would form to buy it. Give most Apple “fanboys” a little more credit than that.

I personally have an Apple logo tattoo (for the letter A in my wife’s name as she converted me to Apple). I also have a Burton tattoo on my foot. Why are both of my tattoos commercial companies? Read the rest of this entry »

I have a ton of stuff to blog about still, but no time right now. My wishlist: iPhone 3G, new Mac Book Pros, otherwise I’m sure I’ll love whatever I get ;) So here’s the link to the live WWDC keynote coverage I’ll be watching as much as possible (within work limitations):

http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/09/steve-jobs-keynote-live-from-wwdc-2008/

And the end result that most matters:

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_iphone/family/iphone?mco=MTE2NTQ