Learning the programming language Ruby can be a wonderful experience. The language is elegant and well-designed, promoting the use of eloquent and very human-readable programming constructs. Also, it speaks to my aesthetic sense in its syntactic simplicity and no-nonsense approach.

Personally, I learned Ruby through why the lucky stiff’s “The Poignant Guide to Ruby”, the Rails handbook, the Ruby Pickaxe book, and a lot of chatting on IRC. At the time there weren’t that many available screencasts (and no MOOCs), which, fortunately, has changed since then.

I like the idea of learning new programming languages ever so often, as it expands and enriches my way of thinking and creativity related to problem solving in the software domain.

Learning can be done in a lot of ways, and I have found that note-taking is an important activity for efficient learning during my personal learning endeavors. However, I’ve always felt like there was some gap between the notes I was taking about programming and the code and examples that I wanted to go with them to completely support my comprehension (especially after some time). You know, runnable code and notes intermixed.

Sure, you can make a Ruby-script and insert a lot of comments, but I’m more of the aesthetic type, so I wanted to be able to throw different fonts, graphics etc. in there. What to do?

Lo and behold! On the O’Reilly Strata + Hadoop World conference in New York, iPython and iPython Notebook was presented, and was is exactly what I have been longing for: Notebooks mixing HTML/Markdown, graphics and, not least, runnable Ruby code.

While installing iPython I ran into some problems, so here’s an end-to-end installation guide using Brew on Apple OS X:

 $ mkdir iruby # Create a new directory
 $ echo 'iruby' > iruby/.ruby-gemset # Define the Gemset to use
 $ echo 'ruby-2.2.0' > iruby/.ruby-version # Define the Ruby-version to use
 $ cd iruby # cd into the directory
 $ brew install zeromq # Install the libzmq dependency
 $ sudo pip install ipython pyzmq jinja2 tornado # Install Python dependencies
 $ gem install iruby pry rmagick rubyvis gruff # Install iruby and other Ruby goodness
 $ iruby notebook # Start iRuby Notebook
 

Being a software guy, I pondered what technology this blog should be built with.

I love the Ruby programming language for its brevity and succinctness (amongst others), so some Ruby-based CMS-platform would have been the natural choice.

However, a static website generated by something (like Jekyll) would also have its charms (most of which would mostly be recognized by its author, I’m sure). Really, the choices don’t limit themselves to just Ruby, as also Scala, Python, Go, Erlang, and many others (JavaScript and Node.js included) are technologies with which I would love to fiddle in building a blog.

As I believe that one of the key traits of any person involved in producing technology-based products should be pragmatism, applying this trait to my thought process led me to good old WordPress; the battle-proven blog software that allows you to focus on getting things done (i.e. blogging) instead of voluntarily venturing down a rabbit hole of tech fetichism while reinventing the genre with new and fantastic software (and, admitted, most software geeks secretly dream of doing so).

I like WordPress, I really do, and I think it’s one of the best products ever produced by the open source PHP community – well, perhaps even by the open source community as a whole, I would argue. It has an efficient and well-designed UI, slick workflows and a large community of developers backing it, and the complete package that WordPress constitutes has helped a whole generation of internet users get their own voices heard world-wide.

So, for now being very mature and pragmatic in having chosen WordPress to power this site, I’m free to venture down into all the other gorgeous and geeky rabbit holes that I can think of (and that’s a lot).