# Is Truer Coding Nirvana Possible?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-truer-coding-nirvana-possible/99865>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 26, 2006, 12:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-truer-coding-nirvana-possible/99865 "2006-07-26T00:07:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 12:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-truer-coding-nirvana-possible/99865/1 "2006-07-26T00:07:11Z")

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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

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**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [July 26, 2006, 4:37am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-truer-coding-nirvana-possible/99865/2 "2006-07-26T04:37:08Z")

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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. 🙂

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

–  
– Tom M.

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**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2006, 4:23am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-truer-coding-nirvana-possible/99865/3 "2006-08-30T04:23:15Z")

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Just an update on my path to nirvana. 😉

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](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. ☹

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

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2006, 8:14am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-truer-coding-nirvana-possible/99865/4 "2006-08-30T08:14:08Z")

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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 🙂

Nah, results in too many bathroom trips. 😜

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

Joe

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/j/b9e5f3/32.png) [@joe](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/joe)\
**Post date:** [August 30, 2006, 5:01am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/is-truer-coding-nirvana-possible/99865/5 "2006-08-30T05:01:55Z")

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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 🙂