Gregory Brown

Biography

Gregory Brown is the original author of Ruby Reports. He has been active in the Ruby community since 2004, and is a member of the new_haven.rb and NYC.rb user groups. He also maintains the support forum for RubyForge. Gregory is a freelance coder who specializes in free software development.

When he is not coding, Greg may be found doing math 'just for fun' or wandering around NYC. You can find him hanging around #ruport on Freenode, if you'd like to stop by and say hello.

Articles

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Ruport: Business Reporting for Ruby
Publish Date: Apr. 8, 2008No one likes developing reporting tools for an application. But without them, many applications are only half-done. Luckily, Ruby has a great reporting infrastructure available to build on, and in this article, you'll learn how to use it. Shoes Meets Merb: Driving a GUI App through Web Services in Ruby
Publish Date: Jan. 8, 2008It seems like you can't say the word Ruby these days without the word Rails following automatically. But before Rails ever saw the light of day, Ruby was a thriving, robust language. So what can you do without Rails? How about connect a GUI application to a back end web service, using two powerful Ruby frameworks? Behavior Driven Development Using Ruby (Part 3)
Publish Date: Sep. 20, 2007Gregory Brown has been testing the heck out of his dots and lines game! In the last portion of his dive into behavior driven development, he looks at custom matchers and introduces us to RCov, a coverage visualizer. Behavior-Driven Development Using Ruby (Part 2)
Publish Date: Aug. 30, 2007Gregory Brown has introduced us to the basic idea of behavior-driven development in his last article. Now, he takes it from abstract to concrete by showing us how to build behavior-driven development into an actual Ruby application. How to Build Simple Console Apps with Ruby and ActiveRecord
Publish Date: Jun. 21, 2007When we talk about databases and Ruby, we're almost always talking about ActiveRecord and Rails. But it is quite possible to use ActiveRecord without the Rails scaffolding at all. Gregory Brown shows you how. Rails Testing: Not Just for the Paranoid
Publish Date: Jun. 7, 2007One of the major features of Ruby on Rails is that it provides automatic scaffolding to set up tests. Rails guru Gregory Brown shows us how you can leverage these capabilities to create unit and functional tests for your applications. Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails (Part 2)
Publish Date: May. 10, 2007In the second part of Gregory Brown's in-depth examination of the Rails ActiveRecord Persistence layer, he looks at how to model relationships such as one to many and many to many. This comprehensive introduction to ActiveRecord will let you hit the ground running when you need to integrate a database into Rails. Understanding ActiveRecord: A Gentle Introduction to the Heart of Rails (Part 1)
Publish Date: Apr. 19, 2007ActiveRecord is one of the key elements that makes up Ruby on Rails. It is the crucial link between Rails and the underlying databases that fuel it. Gregory Brown, lead developer of Ruby Reports, begins a two-part exploration of what makes ActiveRecord tick.

Blog

Why are we still 'releasing' software?

June 22 2008

We've come a long way with tools for developing and sharing our code, especially when it comes to revision control. However, packaging and deploying code for release is still at worst a huge hassle and at best an administrative chore. Can we do better? read more

Ruby + Bonjour = Decentralized Intertubes

June 22 2008

Miserable internet connectivity at conferences is something most geeks have to deal with. As a result of RailsConf 2008, some folks have leveraged Apple's now open source Bonjour service discovery protocol to produce a whole slew of services to help people go off-grid at conferences. This makes serving things such… read more

Why are we still 'releasing' software?

June 20 2008

Ruby + Bonjour = Decentralized Intertubes

June 20 2008

Ruby Mendicant: Proterozoic Prawn

June 06 2008

Continuing on a theme, this post brings you the latest news from Prawn, the Ruby PDF library currently being developed under the auspices of the Ruby Mendicant project. The news this time around focuses on m17n progress, TTF font embedding,... read more

A quick Ruby hack to steal some OS X goodness

June 05 2008

I really like the open command on OS X, but I was too lazy to look for its Linux equivalent. Actually, my solution probably took less time than sifting through a google search: system(case ARGV[0] when /\.pdf/ "epdfview" when /\.html/... read more

A quick Ruby hack to steal some OS X goodness

June 05 2008

Ruby Mendicant: Archaean Prawn

May 26 2008

Several weeks ago I wrote about the first development checkpoint for Prawn, the PDF library currently being developed for the Ruby Mendicant project. I've finally reached the second checkpoint, which involves basic text rendering operations, and this post describes these... read more

Ruby Mendicant: Hadean Prawn

May 03 2008

Back in March, I announced the Ruby Mendicant project after several readers of this blog encouraged me to pursue the idea. For those who didn't see the follow up details elsewhere, here's the readers digest version: Thanks to 70 donors,... read more

A Ruby WTF

April 28 2008

While working on Prawn, I ran into this (not-so) fun little gotcha: >> 1.to_sym => nil >> 101241.to_sym => nil Anyone cool enough to tell me what this feature is all about? Update: I guess it isn't totally clear what... read more

Gobi: A Ruby Implementation for Go Enthusiasts

April 01 2008

Reposting from the official announcement on RubyTalk Gobi version 1.0.0 has been released! * http://gobi.stonecode.org * http://metametta.blogspot.com * gregory.t.brown@gmail.com I am happy to announce the first release of my new fork of Ruby called Gobi. The goal of Gobi is... read more

Laurent is a champ!

March 16 2008

Though I'm typing this from a Mac right now, I'm hardly a fan boy. I spend a little less than half of my time on OS X, the rest spent on cheap PC hardware and ArchLinux, and honestly, I'm happy... read more

Laurent is a champ!

March 14 2008

The Ruby Mendicant Project

March 11 2008

When I wrote the post I'd love to quit my job! (sort of), I was mainly aiming to start a conversation. Still, enough people took me seriously, and now I can announce that the project is officially under way. I'm... read more

I'd love to quit my job! (sort of)

March 03 2008

UPDATE: Okay kids, now it's 50% fantasy. It's up to you to cover the other 50% by donating and spreading the word, after reading my proposal. Here's hoping for the best! UPDATE: Though my original post was 95% a fantasy,... read more