Here’s a brief overview of some of our favorite talks.

class Array
  def random_pick
    self.sort_by { rand }.first
  end
end

So then you can do things like this:

def what_is_your_favorite_color?
  colors = [ 'red', 'blue', 'green', 'yellow', 'purple', 'pink', 'black' ]
  colors.random_pick
end

Please don’t ask my why I’m doing this. The answer has something to do with test data.

desc "The answer to life, the universe, and everything"
task :answer do |t|
  puts "42"
  if Rake.application.options.trace
    puts "Task '#{t.name}' is in --trace mode"
  end
end

Note that you can also set Rake.application.options.trace = true in your Rake task if you always want to see the stack trace information.

How to Become a Better Programmer in 90 Days

In this brief talk I present highlights from three books on my required reading list that (I believe) will help make you a better programmer:

• The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler
• Clean Code by Robert C. Martin
• Refactoring by Martin Fowler

Thanks to Derek Olson for taping and editing, and thanks again to Marty Haught for organizing the conference!

Check out my recap of Mountain.rb, posted in two parts on the Foraker blog.

gem environment gemdir

Hope it’s useful!

“What’s my name?”

I honestly can’t quite remember why exactly the task needed to know it’s own name, but at the time it seemed important and I spent a couple hours digging about before I found out that Rake tasks are shy by nature. Or at least when implemented the way almost every tutorial tells you to implement them:

namespace :life do

  desc "The answer to life, the universe, and everything"
  task :answer do
    puts "The answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42."
  end

end

But how do I know what the name of the current task is? Well, after making a couple of random attempts (like “puts task.name”) and digging around in the very sparse documentation on the Rake homepage, I stumbled across a bit of documentation that talked about “Tasks with Actions”:

Actions are defined by passing a block to the task method. Any Ruby code can be placed in the block. The block may reference the task object via the block parameter.

task :name => [:prereq1, :prereq2] do |t|
  # actions (may reference t)
end

Ah ha! “The block may reference the task object via the block parameter.” That’s exactly what I was looking for. Adding the block parameter allows us to reference the task object itself. And the task object itself has a good bit of useful meta information:

namespace :life do

  desc "The answer to life, the universe, and everything"
  task :answer do |t|
    puts t.name
    puts t.comment
    puts t.scope
  end

end

The task now returns the following:

life:answer
The answer to life, the universe, and everything
life

The first line of output is nifty, and answers the “What’s my name?” question with the fully scoped name of the task. Given that much it’s probably not hard to return the task name in even the most deeply namespaced Rakefile. The second line is the “comment” — actually the description of the task. And the third line gets us the scope (namespaces). There are more methods available, but check teh googles for “Rake::Task api”.

So with this meta information we can do something useful like:

namespace :life do

  desc "The answer to life, the universe, and everything"
  task :answer do |t|
    puts "#{t.comment} is 42."
  end

end

Voila. And that’s probably enough meta for one day.