# Rails boredom antidote? **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [November 19, 2007, 9:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695 "2007-11-19T21:49:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/848f3c/32.png) [@Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Giles_B)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2007, 9:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695/1 "2007-11-19T21:49:46Z")
Bit heretical but I’m kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day out. Two questions if anybody’s interested - What are people working on in Ruby that doesn’t Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.? So far the most interesting not-Rails R. projects I’m aware of are Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on? Bonus points if the Web isn’t even remotely involved. Huge bonus points if robots or psychedelic visuals are. – Giles B. Podcast: [http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com](http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com) Blog: [http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com) Portfolio: [http://www.gilesgoatboy.org](http://www.gilesgoatboy.org) Tumblelog: [http://giles.tumblr.com](http://giles.tumblr.com) ---
**Author:** ![Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/848f3c/32.png) [@Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Giles_B)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2007, 10:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695/2 "2007-11-19T22:03:15Z")
On Tue, Nov 20, 2007, Giles B. wrote: > Bit heretical but I’m kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day > out. Two questions if anybody’s interested - What are people working > on in Ruby that doesn’t Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and > exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.? I’ve been there. I think most of the people who have been doing Rails for longer than 6 months have been. My solution was to start building libraries for anything that interested me. > So far the most interesting not-Rails R. projects I’m aware of are > Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on? > Bonus points if the Web isn’t even remotely involved. Huge bonus > points if robots or psychedelic visuals are. Amusingly, the first library I took on was OSX’s Sync Services via RubyCocoa 😉 I also joined up with a project that had a plist library and worked on that a bit. As for robots and psychedelia, check out RAD (another project that I work on, though I don’t own it), which is all about programming the Arduino prototyping board from Ruby. [rad.rubyforge.org](http://rad.rubyforge.org). You could easily use it to control a robot, and there are plenty of people using Arduinos to make visual art. Back to non-me stuff, though, my best advice is to find a problem that’s interesting to you, that nobody else has tried yet (or that needs love) and hack on it. Rails often seems to behave as a gateway drug to get you into the pure awesomeness of Ruby. Ben ---
**Author:** ![Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/848f3c/32.png) [@Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Giles_B)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2007, 10:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695/3 "2007-11-19T22:07:20Z")
Giles B. wrote: > Bit heretical but I’m kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day > out. Makes sense. > Two questions if anybody’s interested - What are people working > on in Ruby that doesn’t Rails? - Ramaze. And Nitro. - JRuby desktop apps Or, what in Rails is interesting and > exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.? > > So far the most interesting not-Rails R. projects I’m aware of are > Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on? > Bonus points if the Web isn’t even remotely involved. Huge bonus > points if robots or psychedelic visuals are. I bet JRuby + Swing could do the trippy visuals. See Monkeybars. – James B. “Take eloquence and wring its neck.” - Paul Verlaine ---
**Author:** ![Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/848f3c/32.png) [@Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Giles_B)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2007, 11:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695/4 "2007-11-19T23:15:51Z")
On Nov 19, 3:48 pm, Giles B. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > – > Giles B. > > Podcast:[http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com](http://hollywoodgrit.blogspot.com) > Blog:[http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com) > Portfolio:[http://www.gilesgoatboy.org](http://www.gilesgoatboy.org) > Tumblelog:[http://giles.tumblr.com](http://giles.tumblr.com) I’m having fun working on Merb and Sequel. I’m actually writing sys admin types of classes to check on things such as CPU utilization, filesystem space, file queue ages, web server response times, dns queries, radius authentication, sql blocks, custom sql queries (on mssql), ssl certificate expirations, etc… I then write simple nagios plugins that uses curl to send a simple get to my merb server and then parse very simple responses with grep. So nagios is really just a scheduler and alerter right now, until I replace that too. 🙂 All the logic is in my ruby code. I run merb with mutex off and make sure to set a timeout on expensive things like snmpwalks, open-uri, or calling rsync externally. Its been fun. Its mostly just a resource right now and I return plain/ text to the nagios script or xml if asked for it (in case our developers ever want to write code to use my output). Since its not really for an html front-end right now its kind of neat. It feels more like scripting. I’m just using that framework to load all my libraries/scripts into memory and to dispatch the workers. It was kind of expensive on my little monitoring machine to load it all each time the script is run. I went from about 90% utilization to about 3% when I put it behind merb. I’ll eventually add a web front-end interface to it so I can edit the different checks and who gets alerted and so on, from the app itself. Maybe put up some dashboards or make graphs off the data. But that’s later. ---
**Author:** ![Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/848f3c/32.png) [@Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Giles_B)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2007, 1:25am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695/5 "2007-11-20T01:25:42Z")
I’m not actively enough working with it, but check out Gosu. It’s a Ruby game library, but can easily be a GUI tool too. Hardware accelerated 2D stuff! Heck, I’d challenge everyone out there to begin a Ruby GUI building tool built with Ruby. Cross-platform gets extra points. Binding to existing GUI libs gets points too. But to have it GUI’d app for building GUI’s in Ruby! ---
**Author:** ![Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/848f3c/32.png) [@Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Giles_B)\ **Post date:** [November 19, 2007, 10:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695/6 "2007-11-19T22:26:40Z")
Giles B. wrote: > Bit heretical but I’m kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day > out. Two questions if anybody’s interested - What are people working > on in Ruby that doesn’t Rails? Or, what in Rails is interesting and > exciting to more experienced programmers with perspective etc.? I’d venture to guess that Rails work in all covers about half of the total Ruby ergs expended. So, leaving aside alternative web frameworks, there are plenty of projects to choose from. On your second question, about the only thing _I_ find interesting in Rails is performance tuning it. I discovered Rails before I discovered Ruby, but I just couldn’t get into the “Rails attitude”, dismissed the hype, and went directly to learning Ruby. > So far the most interesting not-Rails R. projects I’m aware of are > Rubinius, Shoes, RubyCocoa, and Adhearsion. Other cool stuff going on? > Bonus points if the Web isn’t even remotely involved. Huge bonus > points if robots or psychedelic visuals are. There is quite a bit of that going on … some other people have posted on the subject. Do a Google for “dorkbot” and I think some stuff will surface. ---
**Author:** ![Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/848f3c/32.png) [@Giles\_B](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Giles_B)\ **Post date:** [November 20, 2007, 10:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rails-boredom-antidote/120695/7 "2007-11-20T10:04:47Z")
On Nov 19, 2007, at 9:48 PM, Giles B. wrote: > Bit heretical but I’m kinda flagging on doing Rails day in and day > out. Two questions if anybody’s interested - What are people working > on in Ruby that doesn’t Rails? My company (ASPgems) is Ruby-based. Most projects are web, but some projects are batch processes, data munging, inter-application gluing, crawling, web services… There has been excepcionally some Perl but almost everything is Ruby. – fxn