For the past 12 years up until today stevenwilkin.com has been a Sinatra app. The purpose of the site was to help me learn Ruby which paid off handsomely and I went on to use Sinatra in many client projects so all in all it served me well. Time moved on however and the content fell out of date, the design increasingly became an embarrassment and I’d disabled the contact form as I rarely received anything other than spam through it.
A good friend of mine recently voiced the opinion that the day will soon be upon us when the traditional SysAdmin will no longer be relevant and all operations activities will be some variety of DevOps. Now, I’ve been managing my own infrastructure for some years but every package has been manually installed with every configuration file modified by hand, resulting in snowflake servers which are nigh-on impossible to recreate exactly and have occasionally caused me a lack of sleep.
Like a lot of people in technology a portion of my time is spent wondering what will be the next programming language, framework or whatever to take off and become popular. Of greater personal importance is the matter of which one of them will get added to my toolboox next and press-ganged into productive use. For years now Ruby has been my goto for a lot things and I’ve been doing more and more OS X and iOS development but it had been some time since I last picked up something new and I had a hankering for some shinyness.
For a long time now whenever I’m on the search for something interesting to work on that could potentially be of value to myself and others my attention is brought to topics like machine learning, data mining and natural language processing. These are all areas within computer science which are not particularly easy and have a higher barrier of entry compared to building a typical web application for instance. Yet, if implemented correctly they can provide great insight and fame and fortune are bound to be near.
I think I first heard the term “Rack-app” when I started using Heroku to host a couple of projects. I didn’t know an awful lot about Rack but I did know that it helped a great deal when it came to getting my Rails and Sinatra apps off my workstation and onto the web. Tonight I thought I’d have another quick look at how it works, what it takes to build a Rack-app and what information about the request is available to the handler.
Background A few months ago I was tasked with migrating and maintaining a bunch of legacy Rails apps and a couple of them were misbehaving. Requests were hanging which was tying-up the front-end Apache child processes and resulting in all the web-apps on the server becoming unresponsive At the time I didn’t know what was causing the hanging requests, it wasn’t happening in a predictable manner and on the surface I had all the apps dependencies in place.
Some time ago DW and myself had an enthusiastic conversation about logging various aspects of our electronic lives: emails sent and received, RSS feeds read, incoming and outgoing phone calls, the list goes on. At that time I’d already started tinkering with apps to track my efforts in the gym and changes in my bodyweight, I’ve used notebooks for this for years and thought it’d be interesting to have this information in electronic form.
I’ve just released the latest iteration of hometi.me, a little nano-app I’ve mentioned before. Deliberate Practice It’s only a trivial app but I’ve a bit of free time before the start of a contract so I thought it would be good practice to redevelop it, a task I’d been ignoring for a long time. Goodbye CakePHP, Hello Sinatra The original app was put together quickly with CakePHP, a PHP-based framework I’ve used since my first paid programming gig.
Last month, at the inaugural Super Happy Dev Castle, my buddy Dave Rice told me about a project he was working on involving node.js, an event-based I/O system for Javascript. Javascript outside of the browser? This concept seemed almost ridiculous to me at that time but I thought it was worth a look and cobbled together a quick “Hello World.” I was greatly amused by creating a command-line app with Javascript but did nothing more about it until last week.