Current interests

The nice thing about being a programmer, and especially a Ruby programmer, is that there are always new things to discover. Below is a selection of the things that currently have my attention. They are either on my to-do list, or I play with them in my spare (or work!) time.

Programming languages

IO appears to be even more object-oriented than Ruby.
Haskell is a functional language. I have worked with procedural, logical and Object-oriented languages, but fuctional ones are new to me.

Web stuff

RSS feeds. I have been playing with them for a bit and I like them. They’re a lot easier to generate than I expected them to be.
AJAX, done right. Screencasts on RJS and such have shown me that if it is done right, it will actually make a site better to use instead of worse.

Ruby things

Webgen creates HTML. You feed it with some templates and it spits out HTML for you. You get nice menus for free. I am currently using it to generate this website, as well as for another project.
Revactor is an application framework for Ruby which uses the Actor model, so it should be nice to build network services. I saw the announcement on the ruby-talk mailing list and got curious.
RSpec stories. I have been using RSpec for about half a year now, but the recently introduced RSpec stories do not appear to have much documentation. It appears to help in describing higher-level functionality in a ruby program.
Curb is a ruby wrapper for libCurl. It looks interesting, though it appears to have some small bugs in both its implementation and in the documentation. This could replace command line curl calls embedded in ruby scripts.

Development things

Git, the distributed source code management tool that everyone is talking about. It has already replaced Subversion in my daily activities .

Server things

Setting up an email server. I read it’s supposed to be a nightmare to do, but I do want one for my narnach.com domain. Weekend research challenge!