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adventures on rails
I’ve been in the process of getting re-acquainted with Rails again lately. I’m about to start part-timing at Coupa, and all their stuff is in this great framework that I sadly never got to play with since the SaaS class I took.
Annoyances so far:
* Ruby confuses the heck out of me. I haven’t really programmed in a functional language since scheme (Python doesn’t count. ffffuuu one-statement lambdas), so passing blocks everywhere is quite mind-blowing.
* Deployment is a bitch. I’m still trying to work out the kinks of apache configuration and logging. I guess this is why I’m not a sysadmin at rescomp. I highly recommend using Phusion Passenger, if only because it’s super easy to set up. Something like five lines in a conf file for the most basic configuration, which works fine for my zero-traffic toys.
* Magic everywhere. I guess it’s partially because I’m still unfamiliar with Ruby. But god damn, this is reminding me of my early days with Perl when you could type what basically is an english sentence and it magically works. rspec is one example.
* The devs hate windows. I’ve resorted to just coding on my server until I can get a Mac (refuse to dick around with linux as my main OS ever again)
But on the plus side:
* I love rake scaffold. It’s one of those things I don’t think I’ll ever use at work, but for prototyping and tinkering with new things it’s awesome. Other frameworks I’ve used have the same idea, but they don’t carry them out as nicely as Rails does. For example, django gives you a cool admin interface that’s great if you need it, but completely useless otherwise.
* ERB is actually somewhat intuitive. Python template systems kinda sucked for me - some of them require compilation (eg Cheetah) while others were just confusing to work with (damn you, genshi). Compilation might make it faster but damn, I don’t want all these extra files hanging around forcing an extra step every time I want to see my changes.
* ActiveRecord is still my favorite ORM. While I’m sure I’ll eventually run into annoyances, so far it hasn’t gotten in the way once. So much more happiness than Class::DBI.
* Plaid shirt + coffeeshop + macbook pro + rails = I can fit in when I move to SF. I think Perl forces you to wear suspenders. And don’t even get me started about C.
I’ve come to these conclusions after working on this little quips website. Rescomp recently turned off Bugzilla access for non-technical users, in the process hiding all those bugzilla quips gathered over the years. I tried to style this after bash.org, minus the table-based layout, yay super simplistic designs. Currently working on actually importing all the old quips. For the first time I’m actually having *fun* doing this, hooray Rails!
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