As I get more experienced with ergonomic languages like Ruby, the sharper, stupider parts of Java are coming into sharper relief for me. Fortunately, at least some of these problems are cultural rather than technical, and and can be corrected by simple changes in practices. A great example of this is java package structures.
Month: April 2006
Silicon Valley Ruby Conference
I’ll be spending the weekend at the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference being organized by SDForum. I got interested in Ruby because the AJAX libraries uzanto uses (prototype and scriptaculous) come from the ruby on rails world, and are awesome).
But in the last few weeks I’ve been hacking with Ruby on Rails itself for a new project I’m working on. The experience has left me very impressed with Ruby (an elegent little object oriented language) and especially with Ruby on Rails (a wicked cool web app framework). Anyway, this conference should be good, and it’s local and reasonably priced. So if you’re in the bay area and looking to get your Ruby on, see ya Saturday!
Bill Scott from Y! to speak tonight at Google campus
Bill Scott (AJAX evangelist for Yahoo!) will be giving a talk at the Silicon Valley WebGuild tonight (April 12). The talk is hosted at the GooglePlex in Mountain View.
It’s not free (5$-20$, depending on whether you register online, and whether you’re a member of the web guild), but it’s bound to be good stuff.
Accounting-friendly Investing
I just wrapped up my taxes for the year. It was a hassle, but it was a lot easier than last year, and MUCH easier than four years ago. Over the years I’ve realized that a lot of the accounting pain associated with stock investing is actually avoidable. Below are some tips and tricks to minimize your tax-time blues:
1)Dollar-cost averaging sucks! Sure it works great as a strategy(you buy more when things are less expensive), but all those small transactions are difficult to account for. They make calculating your cost basis a lot harder. This insight leads to three sub-rules.
a)Never buy the same stock or mutual fund twice
b)Never select the “reinvest dividends” option when buying a mutual fund.
c)If you want to buy the same thing, just settle for a “similar” thing instead. For example, instead of buying an S&P 500 mutual fund, buy a DOW mutual fund. Then buy a DIFFERENT S&P fund. Then buy a DIFFERENT DOW fund.
jonathanboutelle.com 