Rails Rumble 2009 is right around the corner and I’m chomping at the bit to register.
Last year I had just started to toy with installing Rails and learning this crazy new thing called computer programming. I really wanted to participate but was short on skills.
This year will be different. I got together with 3 other inexperienced idiots and formed Team Fuckparty. If we can’t call ourselves Team Fuckparty, it’ll be PuckFarty but make absolutely no mistake.
We started outlining the technology stack we plan to use, and I thought it might be interesting to see what the noobs are using and excited about, because it might differ slightly from what the old folks use to build their Rails apps. The preliminary stack is shaping up to look like:
- Git / Github (non-negotiable, but what we’d use anyway)
- Linux VPS / Linode (non-negotiable)
- Ubuntu 9.04
- Ruby 1.8.6 MRI
- Gem -v 1.3.4
- Rails -v 2.3.2
- Nginx
- Passenger
- Amazon S3
- RSpec
- Cucumber
- Webrat
- jQuery
- ERb (I’m pushing hard here for HAML, we’ll see)
- CSS / Sass (Currently a tossup)
- Paperclip
- New Relic RPM
- Asset Packager
Engine Yard Cloud Got New Features
The beta release of Flex is out, and it’s looking fucking slick. We had three apps deployed to Engine Yard’s cloud (I’m running an experiment, as the apps were Apache + Passenger, Nginx + Mongrel, and Nginx + Passenger accordingly), but I played around with the new features and added two of the apps to the same running environment and instance (Nginx + Passenger).
Many of the apps I’ll be dealing with in the foreseeable future need to have an elastic system of scaling both up and down, as traffic probably won’t be completely predictable or stable, and this new system is looking like a dream.
Remember server farms? I don’t.
I wasn’t around for them, but at this point it seems absolutely absurd to not think of scaling up and down as so trivial.
_why posts a potion pamphlet
I don’t know what all the talk about it being a trivial or useless language is (_why’s rhetoric is one thing, any similar reaction is ridiculous). I can’t wait to play with it more. I spent some time playing around with it a few months ago, and I’m really loving the English-like and clear, natural syntax.
Exciting stuff.
I started writing my review of Navicon Torture Technologies‘ Gospels of the Gash
And in turn had a moment of clarity in terms of personal aesthetic and what I want to be doing with art.
I realized I also really like “real” stuff
I had the opportunity to hang out with painters and carpenters over the past few days.
It’s easy to forget when you’re building software the root of why you’re building.
The tactile is really nice, too.
I hope to get more involved with building “real” stuff in the coming months. I think my recent Arduino experiments are a step in the right direction, but I hope to always keep in mind that I build for the sake of building. Too many layers of abstraction and before I know it it’s the code that matters.
I have some new ideas for this blog that have been itching at me for a while. I’ll hopefully get to making them a reality soon.
