Sam on Rails
Here I am in Portland, Oregon, getting ready to head over to the conference center for a three day intensive covering the hottest web development platform on the block: Ruby on Rails. It's the mojo behind all of the 37Signals products (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard, and Ta-Da Lists) which makes sense because their very own David Heinemeier Hansson invented it by extracting it from the code he wrote to make the back-end of Basecamp.
So far my work on the web has involved the front-end, the part that presents the text and image and whatnot in a pretty way but the stuff in the back just usually made me mad. Until now I've felt powerless to do anything about this. When RoR hit the scene almost two years ago I immediately got interested. I picked up the Ruby Pickaxe book and when Agile Web Development with Rails came out I snatched it up in both paper and PDF form. As I went through these books I found that I couldn't give them the time they needed and, because my background isn't in programming, I couldn't wrap my head around all of the ideas.
Last fall I whipped together my first RoR application (with unit-tested code and everything) for Suzanne and Jacob's wedding. It wasn't much and there are a ton of features I wish I had been able to give them on the back-end. But for the most part it did what it was supposed to do, it let them know who planned on coming and how many people they were bringing.
Because of my move west my aspirations of rolling my own applications lay fallow until now. At work we are starting to rethink the way we make applications. I see RoR as offering some critical shortcuts to getting to where we want to be. When you are in a small team it is very easy, in the short-run, to cut corners and to make things that just work now but aren't necessarily the most elegant or beautiful solution to the problem at hand. To paraphrase DHH, code should be beautiful to read. Or as Matthew Mullenweg says, "code is poetry."
So here I am, finishing up my breakfast at one of the coolest hotels I have ever stayed in (and that is saying something), a little intimated but more excited about what I am going to learn.
Wish me luck!
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Sam on Rails.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.samfelder.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/191
Who is this guy?
Leave a comment