Ya, I’ve read Zed’s rant against Rails. I’ve felt the anger and alienation he’s felt, but in the San Francisco PHP Meetup community. After a core team PHP member used a racial epithet to describe something I wanted to do in PHP, the idea of coding web apps using Ruby on Rails began to have more and more appeal.
I went to the San Francisco Ruby Meetup today at Marakana, and although I was late, I quickly got Rails running and caught up. By the end of 4 hours of lecture and coding I had a working blog on my laptop, and learned a lot about coding in a totally fun way from Matt Knox. He teaches Ruby on Rails at Sermo in Boston.
Here are a few notes:
- To evaluate a technology Matt asks, “How fast can I set up a ‘Hello World!’ app?” and “How fast can I iterate through the development process?”
- Validation should happen in the model. The moment you put it in the controller bad things happen.
- To be an Internet Rockstar, you should do WRDD (pronounced word), which is Web Request Driven Development. Put the site up with zero features but a page that gives the users an idea of what the site will be. Code functionality as users ask for it.
- “Databases are a giant persistent hash in the sky.” (Matt Knox) What this means is that DBAs are constrained by tradition when it comes to scalable web apps. A database should be used as one big hashtable if it is to be scalable.
- Do not work for equity.
- Subversion cannot git-stash or git-unstash so use git
I was so happy just getting a blog working so quickly that I registered HipsterHookups today and want to see if I can get a site working by this weekend.