I’ll admit it, blogging isn’t easy. Keeping a set writing schedule is continously proving impossible. What with the I don’t feel like doing anything today and what the hell did I do today? During this longish off I’ve been getting ready to inherit a rails application. As always the sheer amount of things to learn is overwhelming. So, what exactly have I been able to do?

The Ruby Programming Language

I can’t exactly take on a rails application without knowing Ruby(or can I?). The first bit of the challenge was to learn enough ruby to keep myself from drowning in the deep waters of web development with rails. Where to start?

Turns out I was already well on my way, with a ready ruby development environment setup while building this blog. While learning python I’ve come to realize my near hopelessness in following programming exercises that don’t really do anything. My search revealed the excellent ruby koans which seemed designed for exactly what I needed - a quick introduction to the concepts of the language.

I still don’t really get ruby. The syntax always seems a little funky. I have found myself adding python colons to show function definitions, lost in the numerous operators and looking for return statements before end statements. Its a lot to take in and right now my knowledge of python feels more like a liability.

Ruby on rails

From one mind warping thing to the next. The rails web framework makes no apology for it’s design principles. You only need to watch the introduction video to be awed(if rails is your first MVC framework) or thrown into confusion. I could complain about the unfairness of life, but who doesn’t? So instead of complaining, it was easy as gem install rails and getting started with rails to get a simple blog running.

If there’s one thing I can’t complain about it is documentation. Both ruby and rails have pretty comprehensive official online documentation and there is a wealth of other guides. Guides I will definitely need in the coming weeks.

Next steps

I have an app waiting for me, that I need to read and disect. I will need to deploy this app and add functionality to it. I guess this is what excites me. Will it sink or swim? Swim, obviously!