Wow. Google Commissions Ten Ruby Libs. Here are the projects.

Coming from a Microsoft platform background, I’m well versed in the stored procedure mantra, which practically equates to “use them everywhere”. Over the past year or so, I’ve starting questioning that assumption. While stored procs are useful, they do more to add unneccessary complexity to application development.

Jeff Atwood offers up a compelling (yet slightly dated) argument for reducing the scope of stored procs in his post Who needs Stored Procedures, anyways?

For modern databases and real world usage scenarios, I believe a Stored Procedure architecture has serious downsides and little practical benefit. Stored Procedures should be considered database assembly language: for use in only the most performance critical situations. There are plenty of ways to design a solid, high performing data access layer without resorting to Stored Procedures; you’ll realize a lot of benefits if you stick with parameterized SQL and a single coherent development environment.

I now longer use stored procs when working with an application database. They become much more useful when dealing with an integration database. Martin Fowler captures the differences.

The real question to ask is, “Where am I spending my time?”. Am I doing application development where I can encapsulate my business logic into a single application layer? Or am I working with a database that multiple application must interact with where a clear business layer nearly impossible to maintain?

Though I still have a foot in both worlds, I have gravitated over the past few years toward much more application development. I simply enjoy it more. Hence, I find myself using stored procs less and less.

Sometimes, well almost all the time, I really wish I had better design skills. Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin put together a great (and nicely designed) site for wine aficionados called Cork’d. Looks like lot of fun.

The good ‘ole `Save Page As` drops the ball when trying to grab well-formed, standards based websites where most, if not all, of the images are specified in CSS. I spent an hour or so yesterday scouring the web for some tool that would download these CSS images. I found nothing.

I went back to the tried and true Web Developer toolbar extension for FireFox and found the View Image Information option (under the Images button).

It interrogates the CSS file creates a very nice list of all inline and CSS images. You still have to right click and save them individually, but it definitely helps.

I can get frustrating working in the MS world especially after falling in love with RoR. Nevertheless, reality is reality—at least for now. So here are a couple gems for those of us trapped behind the window.

Brian Hogan offers some great write-ups on Deployment Strategies for Rails on Windows servers.

A fellow .NET guy also send me a pretty interesting Visual Studio Plug-in for Ruby. Thanks Jason.

What’s next?

Hal and Jeff offered up some great interviewing questions on their podcast, Out Loud. I wanted the jot these down for posterity and future reference. I hope they can help you land that perfect job. (I’m still working on that one. ; )

Ten Questions from the Interviewee

Obviously these are beyond the normal (salary, benefits, etc.)

1. What do you consider to be the company’s greatest draw for developers? Why would they chose this company over another? What do developers like about the company?
2. Are there any standards frameworks, or methodologies that all developers adopt?
3. What traits do you think are most useful to successful developers at this company? (i.e. curiosity, flexibility, productivity, intelligence, teamwork, etc.)
4. Do developers here work primarily in teams or by themselves?
5. What are the short-term and long-term goals of the the company (specifically as it applies to development). Does the manager have any idea?
6. Employees are often unaware of the daily frustrations of managers. What are a few things that you wish developers were more aware of?
7. How do developers discover the requirements for a project? (Interaction with customer, FLIP, water cooler, etc.)
8. How do you know when a project is done? How do you establish accceptance?
9. What is the company’s policy on doing work remotely?
10. What policies does the company have to help employees learn and get better? Code reviews?

I’ve been a drummer since 7th grade. Currently I keep my chops by playing in a band for the little guys (1-6th grade) at church. Though it’s definitely more tame than some of the bands I’ve been in previous, it’s still a lot of fun.

My son, James, has a fascination for the drums as most little ones do. Through a little magic on the electronic kit, his first solo comes to life…

Get the QuickTime movie

Update: I removed the embedded movie as it was slowing things down. (Don’t have QuickTime? Download it here.)

Everything he’s playing is real, it’s just on a setting called drum solo which creates about 10 hits for every one actual.

Great new Mac ads. Check them out.

I’m succumbing to the pressure…