During RubyConf Argentina 2011 in Buenos Aires, Argentina Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Inside Ruby: concurrency & garbage collection explained. ##Description of the talk: Concurrency in Ruby and Python implementations is quite a hot topic nowadays. In this talk, Matt will explain how concurre...

After my recent RubyConf talk and follow up post addressing the Ruby & Python’s Global Interpreter Lock (aka GVL/Global VM Lock). a lot of people asked me to explain what I meant by “data safety”. While my point isn’t to defend one approach or the other, I spent a lot of time explaining why C Ruby a...

I decided to save myself a session to the shrink and instead just write down my reflection on management. Who knows, some of you might help me and/or challenge my thought process. I recently read a great management book called the five dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni . Instead of telling ...

During RubyConf 2011, concurrency was a really hot topic. This is not a new issue, and the JRuby team has been talking about true concurrency for quite a while . The Global Interpreter Lock has also been in a subject alot of discussions in the Python community and it’s not surprising that the Ruby c...

During RubyConf 2011 in New Orleans, LA Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Complex Ruby concepts simplified. ##Description of the talk: Programming languages, such as Ruby, are natural and elegant. But to achieve this elegance, things have to happen under the hood. Garbage Collection, concurrency, ...

In some cases, you might have a bunch of apps running on different domains/subdomains and/or ports and you would like to make ajax requests between these services. The problem is that browsers wouldn’t let you make such requests because of the Same Origin Policy which only allowed them to make reque...

Recently I wrote a small DSL that allows the user to define some code that then gets executed later on and in different contexts. Imagine something like Sinatra where each route action is defined in a block and then executed in context of an incoming request. The challenge is that blocks come with t...

Recently I had to build a new app as part of my research & development job at LivingSocial. My goal was to get the app up and running in just a few weeks, solid application architecture and graphic design included. When you need to build an app quickly and you want it to have some solid foundations,...

Today my friend Patrick Crowley and I were talking about scaling his website: https://cinematreasures.org since an article covering his work will soon be published in a very popular newspaper. Patrick’s site is hosted on Heroku which comes by default with Varnish caching enabled. The challenge is th...

Note: This was one of my first blog posts on Go and well, I won’t make any excuses, it’s pretty terrible. It’s a good example of what not to do, that is, trying to force the concepts of a different language (in this case Ruby) to Go. I almost never use reflection and the following code is the kind o...

It’s now official, I have resigned from Sony Computer Entertainment America. I was planning on posting this a bit later but since I was politely escorted out of the building by HR/security, I have more free time to let you know of my decision. Before you ask: No, my decision isn’t directly related t...

In this post I will do my best to explain why and how I reinvented the wheel and wrote a custom web framework for some of Sony’s AAA console titles. My goal is to reflect on my work by walking you through the design process and some of the implementation decisions. This is not about being right or b...

My name is Matt Aimonetti, and in my free time I work on Apple’s open source Ruby implementation named MacRuby. I’m also the author of O’Reilly’s MacRuby book. As you can imagine, I’m very thankful that Apple initiated the MacRuby project a few years ago and have been an avid supporter. MacRuby is a...

Concurrency is certainly not a new problem but it’s getting more and more attention as machines start having more than 1 core, that web traffic increases drastically and that some new technologies show up saying that they are better because they handle concurrency better. If that helps, think of con...

Today I was helping someone write an Objective-C framework around cocos2d. C/Objective-C code can be called directly from MacRuby. However the Obj-C code you would like to use might be using some ANSI C symbols that are non-object-oriented items such as constants, enumerations, structures, and funct...

Designing beautiful and scalable software is hard. Really hard. It’s hard for many reasons. But what makes it even harder is that software scalability is a relatively new challenge, something only really done in big companies, companies that are not really keen on sharing their knowledge. The amount...

Part of my job at Sony PlayStation is to architect scalable systems which can handle a horde of excited players eager to be the first to play the latest awesome game and who would play for 14-24 hours straight. In other words, I need to make sure a system can “scale”. In my case, a scalable system i...

##Description of the talk: This year I gave the traditional Apple’s MacRuby talk at RubyConf. My presentation focused on 2 axis: What’s new since last RubyConf Show some examples of how fun it is to hack with MacRuby ##Video {% video https://cdn.confreaks.com/system/assets/datas/768/original/448-rub...

I was working on a piece of code using MacRuby, Webkit and JavaScript. Calling JS from MacRuby is really straight forward but calling Ruby from JS is a but tricky. There is actually a known bug in MacRuby which was giving me a hard time. The bug should be fixed in 0.8 if everything goes according to...

I wrote a guest blog post for Satish Talim over at RubyLearning.org You can read it there.

For the past 6 months, I have had regular discussions with an experienced Java developers who switched to Ruby a couple years ago. Names have been changed to protect the guilty but to help you understand my friend ‘Duke’ better, you need to know that he has been a developer for 10 years and lead man...

Recently I was tasked with finding how to optimize a web application with heavy traffic. The application (a Rails 2.3.x app) gets about 3 million requests per hour and most of these requests cannot really be easily cached so they go through the entire stack. This is probably not the case of most web...

Time really flies! Back in December 2005, Ruby on Rails 1.0 was released to the masses. I remember that was when I first got interested in Rails. Six months later, I was doing Rails development full time. Rails pushed me to contribute to the project, to write plugins, to improve my Ruby knowledge, t...

To celebrate last week’s release of MacRuby 0.6, O’Reilly and I started publishing the draft of my MacRuby book online: https://macruby.labs.oreilly.com/ I started thinking about working on “MacRuby: The Definitive Guide” last year when I realized that the project had a great future but there was a ...

During ConFoo Canada 2010 in Montreal, Canada Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled {{ Apple’s Ruby: MacRuby }}. ##Description of the talk: For many years, Apple has been shipping its OS with Ruby. But starting about two years ago, Apple started developing their own Ruby implementation on top of Objec...

During ConFoo Canada 2010 in Montreal, Canada Matt Aimonetti gave a talk entitled Rails for the non Ruby developers. ##Description of the talk: Unless you have been living on a different planet for the last few years, you have more than likely heard of Ruby on Rails. You have probably heard good and...

The Ruby community is a well known for at least two things: **being passionate and being **arrogant . Two characteristics that often go together but I am not going to defend or justify anything in this post, instead I will try to reflect on my own experience and will share with you my own view point...

At work, we have an XML API that gets quite a lot of traffic. Last week I looked into improving its performance since we are expecting more traffic soon and want to make sure our response time is optimized. My first thought was to make sure we had an optimized ActiveSupport’s xmlmini backend. Rails ...

To celebrate the relaunch of this site and since we are waiting for Rails 3.0 beta to be released, I figured I should share with you what I worked on the other night. I merged patches, refactored and released a new version of googlecharts, my Gem to create graphs using Google Chart API. sudo gem ins...