Yikes, it’s 2008. I’ve been working full-time on Ruby and Rails for about a year now. It’s been awesome. I’ve made a ton of mistakes and learned a ton from them. :D
Random thoughts:
Version Control
Version controlling your source code is really important. About a month ago, I switched over to git. No more subversion. It’s been an interesting transition. Git’s documentation is pretty bad, imo. I still don’t know what the hell I’m doing half the time. But time will fix that. For me, the big benefits of git over svn:
- Branching and merging are sooo much easier. You don’t need to be hooked up to the internet to make a branch. It’s completely painless to make branches and merge in between them. It was always painful to do that in svn. Every developer can have their own branch, and merge between them easily.
- gitk, the graphical source browser, is pretty nifty.
- git bisect. That’s a tool that lets you go back in time to quickly identify the source of a bug. Super awesome.
- Really, you can do pretty much everything in git offline. I’ve been offline for weeks at a time over the christmas and new years break, and I was so productive. And then when I got back online, it’s a simple ‘git push’ to push everything to the remote server.
Books
I’ve really liked The Rails Way. It’s a fantastic reference and guide to Rails.
Software
BackgroundRB got a much needed overhaul and recently hit version 1.0. I’ve been using it in place of cron and it’s been rock solid.
More to come later.