Apologies for the OT and arguably ADV post. I’m close to releasing my
first full-scale rails app, and am looking for beta testers. The site is
for people with old cars (cars over 20 years old), so if any of you fit
into that category I’d really appreciate you heading over to
http://www.autopendium.co.uk/betas/new and signing up for the closed
beta test.
While I’m here I’d like to thank the whole of the Rails community,
especially the core team and the guys on the rails-deployment list. I’m
wasn’t a programmer by background (done a bit of PHP hacking, and some
assembly language and BASIC some 25 years ago), and have had to
essentially teach myself to program in order to do this project (which
is still very much a first draft)*. Doing this could have been a
nightmare; instead the structure of Rails and the beauty of Ruby made it
a joy.
Though my code still leaves a lot to be desired, it’s a damn sight more
structured and robust than anything I’ve done before, and that is
entirely down to Rails. Along the way I’ve come to embrace testing
first, REST, and some fattish models (though my controllers could still
be a little more skinny). Now I have a lot more confidence in my coding,
and the work that I’m doing, and generally judge my code on the simple
maxim: if it’s not clean and simple, there’s probably a better way.
Once again many thanks
Chris T.
*I’ve also had to get to grips with deployment and Linux Sys Admin, but
that’s another story entirely.
