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November is docs month
Posted by Tom | September 24, 2007 comments 12 Responses

So after highlighting the fact that documentation is now soooo important, you must all be thinking “OK, so…?”. The current situation is this. The Hobo team is getting towards the end of a large development project, and all going well we should have a decent chunk of time to give Hobo some TLC in November. So, no guarantees, but you can look forward to a much higher level of docs, and maybe even some shiny new screencasts towards the end of November.

Slides from Railsconf presentaion
Posted by Tom | September 24, 2007 comments One Response

OK the slides are online. Unfortunately I haven’t added any notes as yet, so some of it will be a bit obscure. The theme of the talk was that while being very good for beginners wanting to create a web-app quickly and easily, Hobo is also well suited to more serious projects.

Enjoy!

After Railsconf
Posted by Tom | September 24, 2007 comments One Response

So that was Railsconf. By far the biggest takeaway for me was very simple: Hobo needs docs! Of course we knew that already, but it was really hammered home by meeting a bunch of people who have tried Hobo and are now waiting in the wings for it to become easier to use.

The Hobo talk was fairly well attended, which was great — many thanks to everyone that showed up.

I really enjoyed Dave Thomas’ keynote — engineering is art. His quote from the famous “Mythical Man Month” by Fred Brooks is so wonderful I think I’ll add it here in more than full.

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Who’s going to Railsconf?
Posted by Tom | September 10, 2007 comments 8 Responses

So who’s going? Leave a comment.

It would be great to have some kind of Hobo hackathon one evening. There’s nothing formally arranged but I’d imagine we could find a room to squeeze into somewhere.

See you there!