The Development of Sequel | Hacker News Reader

The Development of Sequel

jeremyevans-pres.heroku.com

34 pointsjeremyevans15 comments

Sequel is wonderful and for me represents a much more natural way to program than both heavy and lightweight ORMs (hibernate and AR).

There's a lot of syntax magic going on to give the appearance of a clean SQL DSL, but it leaks through more often than not. Still, better than anything else I've seen.

What's up with the presentation and meaningless photos taking up all the space? Black text on a white background and nothing else would be a lot better.

As a sort of meta-commentary, why is this presentation two hundred and twenty four (224!) slides long? Am I alone in thinking this is totally, absurdly unreasonable?

It was very tightly delivered. It is pretty amazing that it either is the case or appears that Jeremy knows exactly what slide is going to follow the current one, sentence to sentence. For a one-hour-ish talk, that means many slides last less than thirty seconds.

This is meant to be delivered rather than read, but in retrospect the delivery was, in and of itself, rather incredible.

I switched from ActiveRecord to Sequel about a year ago because I needed good support for composite primary keys, and I've never looked back. It's a phenomenal library, highly recommended.

This has been developed for five years? How have I not heard of it until now?

I haven't either.

As I'm going through the deck, I'm studying each slide and note. It's loaded.

ACID, simplicity, culture, documentation, TDD, prioritization. And more I overlooked I'm sure. Each has nuggets of wisdom.

This is Good.

Sequel is somewhat lowest-level and least advertised of three popular ruby ORMs (ActiveRecord, DataMapper, Sequel). For non-CRUD applications Sequel is usually my go-to guy.

Unfortunately, I can't read this as the site is utterly and completely broken on my iPhone. I'm usually able to ignore rendering issues but this really takes the cake.

Can someone provide a summary?

It's also broken on my MacBook running Chrome. I can only see the first/title page.

Use the cursor keys (right is forward and left is back) to browse through the slides and I had to go into fullscreen mode to see the comments at the bottom of the page.

A very bad UI. I shouldn't have to guess how to go to the next slide.

Didn't work in chrome, was banging head against wall for almost 15 minutes.

I'm sorry. The presentation was built with Scott Chacon's showoff library (https://github.com/schacon/showoff), which I assumed would handle cross browser issues well. I don't have an iPhone or a Mac, so I couldn't test it there.

If you find the many slides with little text on each frustrating then `lynx -dump $url' gets you just the text to quickly skim.

I switched from AR to Sequel about 3 years ago and haven't looked back. It's a far superior ORM and much easier to extend than AR. Jeremy is an excellent steward of the project.

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