Comments on: Agile Web Development with Rails – Chapter 1

By: joeyDotNet

joeyDotNet — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 10:36:50 +0000

@Mike, sure thing.

@Joe,
Funny you should say that. I serve in the media ministry at our church and I’m currently working on the UI design for v2.0 of our church’s web site (which is currently an old ASP.NET web forms app I built like 3 years ago; boy have I learned a lot since then… :S ). And I’m seriously considering building v2.0 on RoR. So that will probably be my first “real” RoR project.

By: Joe Ocampo

Joe Ocampo — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 03:05:00 +0000

There is always a Church Web Site and other non-profit projects that feel great when you are done..

By: mike

mike — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 02:47:25 +0000

Well if you need any remote Rails people to work on your next project, let me know!

By: joeyDotNet

joeyDotNet — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 16:12:33 +0000

Yeah, I’m not too willing to uproot my family at this point either. Luckily I’ve been putting a bug in my team lead’s ear for the past few weeks about us needing to find some Ruby/Rails work (I work for a project-based consulting firm). And he’s actually very open to it, if we can find the work. Apparently, one client last year (before I joined the company) was asking for some Ruby work and no one knew it, so I don’t think we could take the gig.

So, hopefully, I’ll have a “professional” RoR opportunity relatively soon. Doh! Guess I need to learn it first!

Thanks for the link. Always good to have those kinds of links around.

By: mike

mike — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 15:44:00 +0000

I’m just starting to read some of your past posts now. I found the Los Techies blogs through Joe’s posts on BDD so I’m working my way to your blog.

I’m in Canada and not too willing to move so I’m having a hard time finding Rails jobs. It also means that my adoption of Rails (and Ruby) will be slower since I’m stuck doing it as a side gig for fun. If you’re looking around, rubyrockstars.com seems to have a lot of job listings.

By: joeyDotNet

joeyDotNet — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:30:18 +0000

Yeah, if you’ve read any of my previous posts over the past year or so, you can tell that I’ve been looking for an alternative to what the .NET platform can offer for quite a while now. Especially vanilla Webforms, which I’m completely separated from at this point. That’s why I like (and heavily use) frameworks like MonoRail right now. But I’m definitely starting to see how the limitations of a static language like C# are kinda preventing a framework with some of the nice features of Rails from being built on top of .NET.

Funny you mention jobs, ’cause that is very much one of the things I’m curious about. I’m definitely starting to see RoR start-ups and consulting take off.

What’s your take on the Rails market out there?

By: mike

mike — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:17:41 +0000

If you’re truly a geek (i.e. your job is your hobby) then you’re gonna love this book. You already seem like you have an open mind towards a different platform so you’ll probably eat this stuff up.

When I first read about the “convention over configuration”, I was reminded of a bunch of different frameworks that had great potential but never allowed me to override the convention when it didn’t quite match what I needed to do. With Rails, you can completely dump the convention if you want. It makes your life slightly more hellish but it’s possible.

After reading this book, I thought that Rails was awesome. I still think that but now I’m really starting to see the flexibility of Ruby that makes all of this possible. Coding in .Net feels like a punishment now.

Now if only there were some local jobs in Rails!