It turns out that hotels prefer that you not bring your own bottles of scotch to the bar. Who knew?

Marcel Molina explains the three pillars of beautiful code as: proportion, integrity, and clarity.

Jim Weirich gives kudos to Groovy as the inspiration for Ruby’s Builder library. (Cool! Cross-pollination goes both ways. Not a zero-sum game. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.)

If you show up at RubyConf with a Compaq, apparently you spend the morning calculating the distance to the nearest Apple store.

David Black reminds the “veeee-gans” that they’re special.

Nathaniel Talbott: Camping matters because it gets your mind off the drug and refocuses you on the addiction. (OK. Perhaps I paraphrased.)

Taking a short break to push a new app live to the world - there’s some darn good satisfaction in that!

Ryan Davis: Flog your code. Heckle your tests. And while you’re at it, flog your feeds, flog your daily habits, and ask your boss and your coworkers to flog you. You’ll be better because of it.

Wisdom of Matz…

• When asked about his second favorite programming language: “I love all programming languages, except for several.”
• On working with Apple: Some brief comments on his assistance with Leopard, but offers that “Ruby on the next version of OS X will be even better.” (Hmmm. Speculation about a future Apple product. I suspect that Apple’s legal hounds all paused momentarily as they detected a distant disturbance in the force. Regardless, let’s hope he’s right. Some other languages haven’t been so fortunate.)
• When asked what kind of programming he does day-to-day: “Ruby.” Ha! Go figure.
• On whether Ruby is suitable as a first programming language to learn: “Some parents don’t give their children sharp knives, but some do.”