Posts on Ben Scofield

Back in May, I gave a talk at Ignite RailsConf on being awesome.

I've been very happy to see that, for the most part, the evangelism around Haml has died down over the past year or so -- it felt like you …

As I'm just now coming out of the caffeine- and sleep-deprivation-induced haze that was my weekend, I thought it might be interesting to …

Yes, yes, I know I've been gone for a while.

It's been a few days since we wrapped up Developer Day Austin, and I'm only now able to catch my breath – a few snowmageddon- and …

Raise your hand if you have a job description - a paragraph or eight that describe your role and responsibilities in your current …

I had a thought the other day...

[[posterous-content:EJwrquhHwuicvefDasuH]] So, after some difficulties getting the planes to fly on time, I finally made it home from …

The first RubyConf talk I gave was entitled Cleanliness Is Next to Domain-Specificity; in it, I spoke about DSLs, and gave an example of how …

It's a new year, and it's about time for a hard truth: practice, when done properly, isn't fun.

My five-year anniversary with Viget Labs is approaching quickly – I started here back in February 2005.

In light of the impending new year, I thought I'd offer an alternative to the associated flood of well-intentioned but ultimately-doomed …

Seth's post yesterday struck a chord with me, as it reminded me of how I felt a few months ago.

I'm generally a pretty calm guy.

I just read a post from Micah Baldwin that I found very interesting, so here's a quick response: Failure is bad.

I've given my "Comics" Is Hard talk about five times now, and the feedback consistently fell into one of two buckets: Some people wanted to …

Twitter's lists are a fascinating new feature, and people are using them in a bewildering variety of ways.

[[posterous-content:vidmnkAIvtEHqHcylwcn]]In case you didn't notice, the CFP for RailsConf 2010 in Baltimore went out yesterday – and along …

[[posterous-content:ICkAFbstaprzDIahdsEp]]We're rapidly approaching November, which means that another NaNoWriMo is almost upon us.

I've seen one particular complaint about Ruby conferences fairly often over the past couple of years – people question why the same speakers …

[[posterous-content:oBGotzwudxstbsyyhfrG]]I recently read Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters (a collection of essays from his site, …

I was listening to a program on NPR recently, and I heard the interviewee say something interesting about discovering the guitar

Last weekend, I was out in Boulder, organizing and MCing for our last Developer Day of 2009.

I create (or at least start) a lot of microapplications – my "Ideas - Dev" list in Evernote is huge, and I try to pick off a new one every …

Disclaimer: I've said some of the things in this post, as have some of my friends, some of my acquaintances, and some people I don't like

There's something very strange about the concept of follow-through.

Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler.

[[posterous-content:uleIIrdnzGuxAkFulgdg]] http://www.flickr.com/photos/betweenloveandlike/ CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 I've been to a lot of events …

Triangle-area friends!

Here's a trick for creating modular templates in Rails 3: use the apply method Say you like to use Rails templates, but you find them a …

[[posterous-content:npromobotiplCJFzxDBp]]So I've been using Cucumber somewhat heavily for a while now, on both personal and client …

So I spent a lovely 30 or so hours in Chicago over the weekend for WindyCityRails (as I mentioned previously), and despite the short stay, I …

Several things have come together over the past week or so, with the result that I've pretty much solidified my speaking engagements for the …

Polyglot programming was everywhere in the (developer-centric) news what, last year?

[[posterous-content:sgnwcAejwckatlhHxfhx]]Developer Day has visited Durham, DC, and Boston so far....

* I grew up in the South, which means I actually call these "Coke machines," but in the interest of generality I'll refrain from that in …

Whew!

[[posterous-content:CEpgEFwlwAwHkECIikda]] http://www.flickr.com/photos/wwworks/ / CC BY 2.0 Practice makes perfect - anonymous When I was …

[[posterous-content:aIhHctacBwkckJrDbqBr]]I've noticed a bit of a trend among some conferences lately - they're outsourcing/crowdsourcing …

This past weekend was exciting, because it was the first instance of Developer Day held away from Viget's and Relevance's home territory - …

As I mentioned before, I'm thinking a lot about technical presentations and speaking more generally now.

Rob Walling makes basically one very good point in his post "How to Compete Against Open Source Competition," and that point is this: Open …

I've been doing a lot of reading about technical presentations lately - both for my own benefit (since I'm speaking much more often now) and …

I've been blogging on and off for ... heck, years now, and I've tried a lot of different approaches during that time.