Rocket Plumes

I'm a software developer. with over 15 years experience, living in Salt Lake City, Utah. I have written a few articles and presented some talks on Java, Ruby, and their use on Mac OS X. Here you will find random thoughts from a not so random guy about software, entertainment, American culture, and anything else I feel like writing about.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Developer Preview of RubyCocoa 0.90

This is good news. Follow the link above to find out about the changes happening to RubyCocoa. It has jumped from 0.50 to 0.90 and the changes are good. And with RubyCocoa being included in Leopard and with Apple giving it support, RubyCocoa is on its way up.

Labels: , ,

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

How much for a Cocoa developer?

I've been doing Cocoa development on OS X for about the last 3 years in Salt Lake. There doesn't seem to be a lot of Cocoa development going on in Utah. If you know of some, I'd love to hear about it. I'd also like to know what hourly rate Cocoa developers are making. I make most of my income doing Cocoa contract work and I sometimes feel like I'm getting the short end of the stick here in Utah. It's great to work in Cocoa and I enjoy my client's project but it would be nice to make something comparable to what I could make doing boring Java work. So, if you know what Cocoa developers are making, let me know. And if you need some Cocoa work done, let me know. Ruby on Rails work as well.

Labels: ,

Sunday, March 05, 2006

RubyCocoa Presentation for BYU RUG

We interrupt the current "All PackRat All The Time" theme for this blog for an announcement. This Wednesday (March 8th), I'll be driving down to Provo to give my Ruby Cocoa presentation to the BYU Ruby Users Group. I'll probably have some repeat visitors from URUG, but it will interesting to meet some more Ruby people interested in Cocoa.

For some reason, the folks down in Provo seem to be a little more interested in non mainstream technologies like Ruby, NeXT (in its day) and hence Cocoa, etc. I wonder why that is? As a University of Utah alumni, that bothers me a bit. Are the Utes turning out Java, .NET lemmings? The answer is probably another post, but you can look at Alan Kay and his talk entitled "Are Computer Science and Software Engineering Oxymorons?". He gave this talk at the University of Utah last month and I found it quite interesting.

Labels: ,

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

RubyCocoa for URUG

I'm giving a presentation on RubyCocoa at URUG tonight. Basically it's the same presentation I gave at O'Reilly's Mac Dev 2003 conference, but brought up to date. I'm looking forward to seeing what the Ruby guys think about Cocoa. I think they'll find it exciting.

I'll be giving the same presentation at the BYU Ruby group in February.

Labels: ,