Pervasive Code

A friend who is working primarily in the J2EE technology world (as I was, until early 2006) asked me for a how’s-it-going with respect to Ruby and Rails.

The short version:
- Ruby is fun to program in, as you’ve probably heard
- Rails is over-hyped, but it’s still quite good (definitely not perfect)
- I like the productivity of Ruby on Rails but I wouldn’t call it a silver bullet by any means
- Ruby performance was bad and is getting less bad, and can even be good if you do what the experts say
- The real gem (har har) in the Ruby and Rails space is the community itself
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7.04 (meaning “the major release planned for 2007/04″, not meaning “the minor release following 7.03″) was released on April 19th. I upgraded today and it went pretty well, with a bit of manual cleanup required. More details after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

For two weeks (ending on this past Wednesday afternoon), most of my days and nights were occupied with a self-administered crash course in the Ruby programming language, outside of the Rails framework. I had struggled somewhat with Objective-C in January, partly because of the massive combined burden of learning the language, the Cocoa framework, the Xcode IDE, and the odd but brilliant Interface Builder. So, I wanted to try and attack Ruby in isolation.
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I started programming in Ruby this week, and so far I like it a lot. From my initial use of Ruby as a backup automation scripting language, here are my thoughts.

You might be wondering, why am I working on backup scripting now? Don’t I have some big project I’m supposed to be working on 24/7? Yes, and actually this work is in the critical path of that project.

My super fast laptop is still away being repaired for a video problem, so I’ve taken a major hit in terms of the resources of my main computer: 90% less MHz, 36% less display area, 50% less memory. In the meantime, I’ve been avoiding tasks that need a lot of CPU or graphics performance and instead working on things that are easier on my old desktop computer.

This week, I decided that I would pause working on the design and implementation of my startup project, until I had really sorted out my server backup and monitoring situation.
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I finally bit the bullet and figured out how to run a mixed-release system using Apt.
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