Is Truer Coding Nirvana Possible?

Rails
#1

I’ve been web developing for a long time, and last week it felt like the
final piece of the puzzle finally fell into place for me with Markaby
(no more angle brackets, slashes, closing tags, quotes, etc. Yay!) to
reach a state where web development is enjoyable and easy and powerful.
I’ve gone from:

ASP (NOT .Net), PHP, Perl
MySQL
CVS
Dreamweaver, Frontpage, and numerous other IDEs
Apache, IIS
Windows

to:

Lighty
Mongrel
SVN
Rails
Ruby
TextMate
PostgreSQL
Markaby
Fedora Core (server)
Mac OS X (desktop)

Does it get any better? Any other technologies which make life even
easier? I haven’t used Capistrano yet since I only have a single server
(true, I could still use it, but it seems to really make life easier
with multiple servers). Anything else?

Joe

#2

On Jul 25, 2006, at 3:07 PM, Joe wrote:

Does it get any better? Any other technologies which make life even
easier? I haven’t used Capistrano yet since I only have a single
server
(true, I could still use it, but it seems to really make life easier
with multiple servers). Anything else?

Don’t taunt Capistrano. :slight_smile:

Seriously, it’s a deployment tool. Multiple server functionality is a
bonus, not the core reason to use it.

–
– Tom M.

#3

Just an update on my path to nirvana. :wink:

I gave in and installed Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, Mongrel, and various
other gems on my Powerbook and abandoned directly editing files on the
server. I followed the directions at
http://www.robbyonrails.com/articles/2006/05/29/install-ruby-rails-and-postgresql-on-osx
and it went as advertised, though it took hours to compile everything
for some reason. :frowning:

Then I got myself up and running with Capistrano – it’s really a pretty
cool program. Had some problems getting it to get Mongrel to obey, but
overcame that. rake deploy is such a powerful command…

Then I finally committed to TDD. Feels great knowing I haven’t broken
anything after editing. I’ve now installed zentest and am using
autotest. I hear unitdiff is good.

I’m also finally getting around to really switching from tables to CSS
for layout stuff, and I’m liking it.

I’ve never loved coding more. If anybody has any additional tips, please
feel free! I haven’t gotten around to writing integration tests yet, and
I see there might be something called “dialog-driven development” (don’t
know if they’re the same thing). I’ll be up on a mountain top, in a
lotus position, coding…

Joe

#4

Daniel H. wrote:

This is not strictly related to coding, but I’ve found that drinking
lots of
water really helps keep my energy up when setting in front of the
computer
4-10 hours at a time :slight_smile:

Nah, results in too many bathroom trips. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Also, I forgot to mention RJS, which is easy.

Joe

#5

This is not strictly related to coding, but I’ve found that drinking
lots of
water really helps keep my energy up when setting in front of the
computer
4-10 hours at a time :slight_smile: