The past while I’ve been busy providing technical consultancy to BT and haven’t had much drive to work on anything on my own time. The itch has returned the past couple of weeks though so I thought I’d see what I’ve been missing in the Rails world and in what better way than getting a basic Rails 3 app up and running. My environment was already setup for Rails 2.3.* and Yehuda Katz’ post served as a guide to get me up to speed with the beta loveliness.
At the moment I’m in between paid work and have been using my time to generally enjoy life but to also improve my skills. I’m all about the skills. As an act of deliberate practice to hone my skills with web-application development and to deepen my understanding of the Rails framework I’ve been adding to my collection of nano-apps. A while back I had an idea to develop a URL shortener just to see how little code would be required but decided the world really didn’t need another one.
Well, it only took me 2 and a half years but I finally used Rails to develop a catalogue for my DVD collection. The catalogue loosely fits in with my series of nano-apps and is hosted on movies.stevenwilkin.com. The code is publicly available on GitHub for anyone who’s interested. All’s left now is to actually use the system and fill in the details of my collection!
I released my first production Rails application, hugagoth.com, last night. I first started playing with Rails over 2 years ago and it has taken me until now to take an app through from conception to initial deployment. And an interesting journey it has been. When I first started investigating Rails I had never used a web framework before and the Ruby language really confused me, but there were a few things I liked.