From: James Britt Date: 2006-08-02T07:02:41+09:00 Subject: Re: Help with complicated problems Luke Kanies wrote: > Hi all, > > I've been working about entirely in Ruby for the last 18 months on my > open source automation project, Puppet[1]; I live, eat, and breathe this > project and thus ruby. However, I find that I basically never read or > post to ruby-talk. I think the main reason for this is that I seldom > have problems that I can easily describe -- in other words, they're > usually problems with modeling, abstraction, patterns, or data vs. code. Welcome to the club. I think that half the battle is getting a problem into terms that can be expressed in code or pseudo code. > ... > How do people get help with their complicated problems, things they > won't find in a reference book? I'm constantly trying to refactor my > code and my ideas, but I usually need some kind of outside influence to > do that. The people on tis list, for the most part, are quite open and friendly. So there is a decent tolerance for ill-phrased, off-the-wall questions. (I think the main gripe many have here is when people ask for help without demonstrating that they've done their own legwork. I.e., "Dear ruby-talk: Please do my homework. And can you hurry?") > > Could we create some kind of "complicated problem whiteboard" or > something? Would people be interested in that? > > I'd like to find a way to get more involved in the Ruby community and to > get better at Ruby programming, but the problems I'm interested in don't > seem to fit well into mailing lists. Or am I wrong about that, am I > just missing the high-level discussions and only seeing syntax questions? > Take a stab at it and see how people respond. I like hearing how people reason about their code and projects, and I believe their are thought idioms peculiar to working with Ruby. You might also consider the pragprog mailing list: http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/community/ > 1 - http://reductivelabs.com/projects/puppet > Is there a Puppet Master? http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0098143/ :) -- James Britt "Inside every large system there's a small system trying to get out". - Chet Hendrickson