Buy the book instead

There was a digg last night on the top 12 Rails tutorials. All there in a nice neat overview. As I blogged before, according to me, these tutorials don’t work. You should buy the book instead.

I spent countless nights and airport trips reading ‘the book’. I made annotations all over the book. Read chapters over and over again. Even now, after some 12 months, I still refer to the book every few days or so. It is never more than 1 meter away from where I’m coding.

I was in some kind of distress when I learned that using physical books was so 1990’s and that annotations I scribbled all over are difficult to upgrade. So … I came to this conclusion: I am probably doing 60-70% of the things wrong or sub-optimal. By browsing the book, I often read paragraphs that I forgot about. So I will buy a new version of the same book, re-read it all over again so I am sure I will make less ‘mistakes’.

So, don’t do the tutorials, buy the book and consider buying the book again in 12 months or so to re-read it.

hostingrails, an excellent choice

The guys at hostingrails.com are great. If you are looking for an excellent price/quality ratio, give yourself an account on hostingrails. I tell you, you won’t be dissappointed.

I am fairly new to linux, it had been years since i worked on the old PDP 11’s so my linux skills are a bit rusty. Still I managed to get everything rolling, installing MySQL and all.

Mind you, it would not have been possible without William, the guy at support@hostingrails.com. The speed with which he.she answers is unbelievable. I suspect there is not just one William, but he has 8 brothers or so…

This is what you need when you make your first moves in this rails deployment world.

Can an ‘over 35′ code ?

This is a blog entry I came across the other day, well actually it was a comment. The younger generations that have millions of years ahead of them, can’t understand that someone who is over 35 would even begin to understand what ajax, ruby on rails, web20 would be all about. Some one over 35 is probably

• a manager
• a vc
• buzzword generating drooler
• all of the above

Well I tell you, for my day job I regularly do interviews. I always ask the candidates under 35 if they have heard of web20, ajax and ruby on rails. Although often it is not a requirement, it gives me an idea how on top of things someone is. More than 50% haven’t got a clue.

So you can be sooooo wrong the next time you evaluate someone’s skillset based on his/her age. I someone has a position where you need active knowledge of Project management, PrinceII, VAX/VMS, RDB, VAXC, NT4, Visual basic 3.0, NT4, .NET –and– Ruby on Rails : I’m your man !!

Microsoft is dead, then alive, now dead again

I don’t get this ‘microsoft live’ thing. I admit I haven’t spend 1 sec to understand it, but I did click on the www.live.com, and it still wasn’t clear for me. Another zillion marketing dollars down the drain. When I come to think of it, it’s the name that enoys me. Live, what live, why is it live now? Live for me is like Eric Clapton, live on mtv, but live software?? So and when it is live now, what about all those things we have used before? Was this <dead> as opposed to now <live>. What does that make me when I don’t use Windows Live, a software necrophile?

Ok, let’s consider it is live now. I tell you it will not be for long. The dead smell is all around it. The visual studio and .net towers begin to be so heavy they will be crashing down soon. This is because we have passed a critical boundary. If fools like me with a few hours to spare per day, can build, deploy and maintain applications using open source, and get paid for it, there will be numerous other far brighter than me that are building software by the meter.

Some nurses that work with old people have told me, they can smell when somebody is dying. The moment they enter the room, they ‘know’ someone is near the end. With Microsoft it is a very similar thing. Mind you, it will never actually die. My god, i still work with customers who are migrating software to their good old vaxes. So I’m guessing there will be NT4 systems until 2034. But while Bill is gradually loosening his grip on the company, the ‘ego’s take over. Each department, each C*O, each god damn developer will want to have his/her say. I tell you, the thing will come to a grinding stop.

You don’t have to believe me, just look at what dvorak said…

What rails did and python didn’t do (for me)

Yes, a demo application is up and running. It’s a simple 5table db for a flower shop with search and index function. Nicely integrated with 6 static html pages. As usual when switching environments (this time from my cosy laptop, to the big cruel world of RailsHosting providers) it took more time than hoped (hope is an expensive emotion). My first problem was getting this mySQL database up and running. The thing always bothers me about passwords and users and privileges. There is something there i still not understand. But my biggest problem was getting from dispatch.cgi to dispatch.fcgi. Mind you, this was the first time I did some production work on linux systems. But now it is there, the customer has seen it and tonight I visit the customer to discuss new features. I will actually charge some money for it. So my investment (the price of the book I bought) will have paid off.

I have compared this to a similar experience with Python 2 years ago. I had the same adventure style idea of replacing all the bloatware .net development mega stuff by this simple and elegant framework. I programmed about 6 months in python. It is sure a very elegant language and framework, the support & libraries available on the internet fantastic. However, it never passed the ‘can I go live with this thing’ test. For some reason, it lacked that production feel. Now, this is a very personal view, but some may understand what I mean.

The rails thing was different, I only bought one book and about 1/3th of that book deals with scaling, going live, tuning, selecting webservers, migrating to new versions, protecting against injection and so on. It offered the complete shebang, AND IT WORKS.

Back to the old days

Don’t be afraid, this is not some nostalgic rant about how everything was much nicer, friendlier in the old days. There is this one thing that struck me in the past few weeks. Back in the old days (this was 1983-1990) it was possible that you ‘knew it all’. This didn’t mean that you could be some smart ass showing off. There is no real good or bad period for that. No, I mean that all the technology you needed from building to deploying an application could be grapsed by one person. I am talking about the VAX/VMS days here. There was this one project where I delivered a production line monitoring and control system (MES, if you know what that is) all by myself.

This means, writing specs, design, coding in c, rdb database, installing os, connecting various hw devices (even rfid, in those days, can you imagine) and getting the invoices paid.

Things got worse after that, you needed busloads of people to get systems out the door that were hardly any more difficult: webdesigners, dba’s, system engineers, network specialists, architects, …

Now that I have read this book, I can see that I can control it all over again. What to do for webservers, how to scale, sql injection, .. It’s all there in a neat 500 pages or so. You can read 500 pages on one or two airtrips.

So this is my setup

• laptop (4 years old, so not that powerfull)
• mySql
• radrails
• rails
• Msword for my doc, and
• a datamodel tool from my dayjob

and that’s it. I happy typing away this application. I think I can even get something live after 3 months. And that is only after/before hours work.

Is rails p0rn0graphy?

I have used zeros in stead of letters ‘o’ in the title above, just to make sure I am not getting kicked out by some child protection scheme. Why am I writing this title…

For the first time, I am starting to consider if I should not push to get my_big_company_bloated_software_product v2 version done in rails. How much more elegant that would be?

What could stop it?

SCALEBILITY

the people at 37signals area running 5 aps for 400.000 users on 13 servers. Even if they exagerate a 100 times (my users are a bit more frequent users that the average 37signals registered user) I figured out that is about 400 users/server. Surprise surprise, that is exactly the number we have reached, after 8 weeks of intense scaling effort. (We got IIS out of memory at 113 users)

KNOWLEDGE

If I can figure it while waiting in airports, most younger people should be able to figure it out after 3 weeks.

SO WHY NOT DO IT

Well, this thing is so ‘off limits’ you could consider it like p0rn. I ordered my book on my home address, i wouldn’t want any on my managers see what I am up to. “why don’t you spend your time writing specs for version 32.89″ I hear them say. I take great care in explaining some of the things I have learned, so people of my day job, are not realizing I am writing this new killer app.

It’s like this post, about if rails would ever become mainstream. The answer was as neat as rails itself: we wouldn’t want to…

The RadRails erlebnis

YES, YES, YES !!! This is thE best thing I have seen on top of ruby/rails. RadRails is just it. For us, poor visual studio adepts, we need this IDE thing to feel at home. My god what a tool, what wonderfull guys to put this together. And man, i’ve seen them all: RDE was so basic, you could feel the silicon when you touch it. Scite was my preference for a few weeks. I had to download a desktop manager tool called Virtual Dimension (wonderfull little tool by the way) to manage all the scite instances. With an explorer window on the site to manage all the activations. Until I painfully realized that clicking the same file multiple times in the explorer window would of course create a new instance (see how stupid i am). So the last window overwrites the … (laughter arises from the masses). So I kicked out scite unless it was for editing ruby files of maximum 15 lines.

I had seen some references to eclipse, drooled over the wonderfull stuff they promised. So I installed the beast, but everytime I try to fire it up, it came bothering me about java machines being out of date, I upgraded/downgraded my JVM’s like a rollercoaster, helaas to no avail…. This java thing is soo huge, you can easily fit 12 .NET worlds in it.

So I came across RadRails (why did it take me soooo long?), very promising webcast, yes that is what I need. After installing, I had the same JVM misery. Of course, Radrails sits on top of eclipse, so that should not have surprised me. (again laughter from the masses).

Google to the rescue! Why didn’t I do that before? Yes, there it was: ORACLE!! Because of my other life where I am involved with corporate big bucks off the shelf bloatware, I need this oracle. Mind you, not the database, just some thing to be able to speak to an oracle db on our server. Why you would need an extra bit of software besides the gigabytes of .net to speak to oracle, and why this thing is in Java is for smarter people than me to explain. This thing apparently insists on a specific java lib, which it had put nicely in my path. What a rotten smell!

Then I had it: “RadRails”, from the little splash window I knew it: I am going to like this tool. It even took me a few days before I realized I could now fire up this eclipse thing. Phew, quickly closed it again. Smelled to much java. I must say, there are a few java words still left in the RadRails help, but I forgive them. My god, these RadRails people are my new heros, I worship them every day. If only I could have intellisense and step by step debugging…no no forget it, i will read the book and code without errors instead.

What wonderfull productivity I have gained since I have radrails, I could stop thinking about the editing, and concentrate on the language instead.
Thank you thank you…

A pattern is developing

No not some fancy new MVC, Factory, Singleton or what have you. No a way of developing. It has been since my days on vms and pascal and c compiler that I haven’t used physical books, things with paper. In my .net days, you could find everything you needed in the confined 1400×1050 size of your screen. With Rails that’s no more. You need books. There is not one website that tells it all. I still haven’t found a decent Rails manual online. I am sure there are tons of books that explain it, but no online directory. I guess I should look a bit better.

There is just no way you can develop any meaningfull page, let alone an application, without some decent manual. Now, like in the old vms days, it’s with books. It takes some organizing. As I fill most of my time with my (non rails) day job, I leave the physical book at home. That means I cannot get any work done, unless within 1 meter from that book. Argh… Maybe this David Hansson person is just setting this whole rails thing up like a complex plot to sell his books.

I am even considering to not upgrade my rails, because my book will be out of date. Or is this David guy thinking I am buying a new book everytime he brings out a new version?? I scribbled the first one full of handwritten notes, how am I going to upgrade that to the new version?

RAILS TUTORIALS DON’T WORK

Please everyone, FORGET ABOUT THE TUTORIALS ! They don’t work. Not even the ‘4 days on rails‘. At best they give you a glimpse of what is possible, but don’t for a minute assume you will be taking your first steps to learn the framework, let alone the language.

This Rails/Ruby thing is soooo big and soooo deep, you can’t possibly think you can ‘learn’ anything from a 4day, let alone a 30min intro.

Instead buy the books, only when I was about 1/3 through “Agile Web Development with Rails”, I started to consider making some applications. Finally I could start to understand what all this weird syntax and hocus pocus was about.

I think I may have done that out of frustration. I am probably not that intelligent that I understand it all at once. I took me ages to realy understand the rails model view controller, and where was what. I am still not quite sure how the controller bit relates to urls and pages and structure… I guess I’ll get that when I have developed my 4th app.

So I took once step back, no I took 2 steps back. I decided that I needed to understand Ruby before understanding Rails. I am not sure that that was the right thing. I have seen people delving in rails from day 1 and finding out the neat ruby tricks as they went along.

So after the few weeks restling at night with Ruby, my amazon order arrived with the shiny new rails book. Boy oh boy, how stupid I have been. Now things finally fell into place, there was some realy intelligent thinking in this thing. And above all it works.

So, if you ask me, spend time to decide on whether you want to go into rails or not using the tutorials. But they are like the shiny new sales brochure of the Formula 1 car in your local car dealer. Don’t think you can drive the beast just from looking at the brochure, use the brochure to decide if you are going to take the driving lessons or not. See you on the Formula 1 rails track. (argh, i have killed you with this one…)