commit and run

Sydney Dev Camp's "first batch" of students just graduated and I was there to see if we could find any new geekoids to come help out at LawPath.

See more videos from the night here and learn more about the first batch here.

Personally I was totally impressed by the quality of demos by individuals who had never written a web app before. Take away?

Tutorial Post

So, I've been building my first Rails app following a pretty ambitious series of posts by Glenn Goodrich.

It started really well, "first you need RVM". Ok, RVM, cool. So RVM is a Ruby environment manager. It manages "rubies". Easy, got it.

But what are rubies? Well "Rubies" are Ruby runtimes...? So they interpret and execute ruby..? I'm guessing they also have their own compatible/incompatible gemsets? Whatever, no time to getting bogged down by these details, let's move on.

So Gemsets are sets of Gems. And Gems are libraries... is that right?

Ok, Gemsets are libraries, fine. Then I install Rails. Got it.

I Just Want To Build a Web App

But then I have to install RSpec, got it. But now I have to use brew, and bundler. What?

And now in the command line I'm using Rake, Brew, Bundler, RVM, Rails, Spec! Why, why so many command tools! I just want to build a website!

Then I have to edit a gem file config, or something, for bundler I think. I have to comment out bits and specify version of gems. I just want the latest version! Oh, I also have to create a rvm-config file in my root or something. Why? Well the article never says.

Ok, done all that. Now I write a test. But I have to comment out bits and create other files somewhere for supporting Mongo (which I want to use).

So I write my test, but the RSpec fails. Not the tests fails, but the actual running of RSpec fails. I have no idea why because the article assumes it won't fail. Most likely it's because I edited one of the config files incorrectly, but which one? Again, the article never really explains why you're editing these configs.

I Give Up, or, Let's Try RubyMine

So, needless to say, after spending at least a few hours just trying to "setup" and understand everything I've decided to "pivot" and just install RubyMine, which I'm hoping will abstract all framework stuff from me and just let me build an app?

So, I've been looking at the job market and apparently c# isn't "cool" anymore. Ok, c# was never "cool" which is a shame because c# is a great, GREAT language. AND .net, despite what all the cool kids say, well, it's fucking cool too.

Despite c# + .net being incredibly elegant, mature, and able to scale quite easily, the fact is the type of companies I want to work for/with simply aren't interest in .net, and why should they be? It involves running windows for a start, and why would anyone want to do that (I myself write .net in a VM on my Mac).

In order to learn Ruby I've been following a great series of posts on RubySource by a fellow named Claudio Lassala written specifically for .net devs looking to switch.

I'm almost through all the tutorials (plus a few others on RubySource) and am getting ready to write some code. However, I thought in this post I'd share my initial thoughts so far:

I know it's not cool to say this, but damn it I just don't get why anyone would ever give up static typing!! Especially when c# offers loads of dynamic goodness??

Heroku does look pretty cool, though if you'r a .net web dev and you're not using AppHarbor you probably hate yourself.

I have serious issues with the fact that by default Ruby on Rails doesn't seem to scale very well. I posted a question to stackoverflow in which the answer left me very surprised that Ruby on Rails is still being used!

I am going to miss LINQ very very much. It's one of the most powerful features ever introduced to application development. It's just so good.