Technology and me

Let me digress. Coming in the workforce without experience, a day doesn't go by that I don't learn something new at work. Code aside too, I'm being pushed. The applications I make replace systems - systems built with oracle forms, access, SQL Server, and other mismatched technology. People's jobs and daily tasks depend on the work I do, and I take pride in the quality and usability of my applications. However well I feel I do, the legacy systems seem to creep along rolling over small unappealing traits that the user expects. "It used to look like this. Why does it now look like this? Why is the button here? What are my roles? Do I have access to this. Well, no I don't use it, but sometimes if they ask me this then I could find the answer there." It's nothing personal with what I developed, it is just what they used everyday for four years and now it's completely different.

I decided to take a similar adventure - learn something new. A language, a new framework, a new idea, and see how I do. With the elite jumping off the Ruby on Rails bandwagon, I decided there was room for me to jump on. I didn't know any Ruby and never used rails. A simple google search, "ruby rails os x," reviled a quick tutorial. Installed Ruby, RubyGems, Rails, and MySQL and I was off. Wait, I've learned my lesson before - bookmark the Ruby and the Rails docs. Okay now search "ruby rails os x." Generate a migration script, fill in some fields, and type the word scaffold. Then "oh! There is my first ruby on rails webpage. Not too much exciting just Create, Read, Update, and Destroy (CRUD) functionality. I explored further. What else does this get me? Pagination. A few more lines of code and I got some validation. Let's take this a little further. For the first few tasks the general work flow was google search, cut, paste, edit, try again, try again, oh I see, try again, and works. Without much experience I navigated around the RubyOnRails magic. I didn't jump in, just dabbled and took things in small steps, a change here does this, a change there does that.

"Convention over configuration" or Ruby magic are RoR's unofficial slogans; at first, it was frustrating - this unexpected behavior. Eventually, I found out that if I want to configure I can, but it just takes investigation and google to find out where. If Ruby On Rails was someone's first framework, it hides the MVC standard. I can live with that as long as we don't end up with a generation of PHP hackers.