Things I learned at TRUGHat
Posted on: 2006-05-10

• Nobody in Liberty Village knows where anything is - even if it's a patrolling security guard and the building you're looking for says 'TUCOWS' over the entrance in huge letters.
• The Tucows offices are fantastic, and include a foosball table, but their front doorbell doesn't work.
• While most people at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference were using EMACS or TextMate, the Toronto Ruby community seems to prefer vi/vim.
• Austin Ziegler has some serious vim-fu.
• 'Halo Statue', the name of Austin's website, is not about the Master Chief, but rather what people say in the Maritimes when they answer the phone: "Halo? S'that you?" There's a long joke here that I could tell but that I would just ruin. If you should meet Austin Ziegler, he'll tell you - and good, too.
• I remember more C from the one college course I took in 1994 than I thought I did.
• The dereference operator in C (*) is also called the 'splat'.
• It's difficult to do an entire TAR utility library in 7 hours, including lunch.
• When spring hits Toronto, there is nothing better than eating outdoors on a rooftop, even if it's the kind of windy, slightly chilly weather that would make California people hide indoors.
• If you inadvertently lock yourself out of the Tucows office while having lunch on the rooftop, you can take the fire escape down to the Canada Blood Services lot and if you give one of the van drivers a despairing enough look, they'll open the gate for you so you can go back around to the front entrance.
• The $1000 Mac Mini with Intel Core Duo absolutely smokes my 17" PowerBook G4, which was significantly more expensive.
• Ruby's File::stat library works like C's stat library - except that it only seems to read, not write.
• One of the most important aspects of any endeavour is to have a good acronym that by its name alone suggests a cartoon or something real, or some creature from Tolkien. Ruby Archive Tools - RAT - is pretty good. TRUGHat is better.
• While converting from Java/JSPs to Ruby on Rails involves removing a lot of code, due to dynamic typing and ActiveRecord, converting from C to Ruby is even more fun, since you can get replace dozens of lines of memory management and type checking code with ... nothing.

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