Rails; Two Weeks In; Coming from Django

These aren’t new. I think there is a lot of mutual respect between Rails, and Django. On more then one occasion I have seen Jacob Moss give kudos to some part of rails.

I never thought there was much of a difference. I thought ah, cool, yea if I ever had to I could pickup rails. While, its not been as easy as picking it up, it has been easier then going from QBasic, to assembly.

In a funny turn of events, I feel as if I have made a huge clerical error in not at the bare minimum, jumping in. It left a hole as big as a jumbo jet open in my iron curtain of knowledge. So, to correct that, I have decided to go for a swim. I am going to post my code up on github soon, and the site will be up soon too. I am not sure what I want to call it yet.

Basically the idea, is that I want an instavideo, see instapaper for more context. I think instapaper is just a kick ass way to consume longer reads, and it gives me warm fuzzies inside. When I talk to other people who like instapaper, you can see there eyes light up. Using instapaper in some sense means you are interested in reading, and not just casually. This helps to buffer a larger point about people on the internet still do want to read, but I want to talk about video. Video, right now is as frantic as blogs were a couple years ago.

I feel the video world is ready to start seeing well crafted channels of video coming out over the web. There is boxee, kicking the pants off all its competitors, when its not drinking to much and coming into work late. The iPad is has all the big players, rushing html5 video out the door. So, video, is getting ready to bust out, and I need a complement to instapaper.

So, I am building in ruby, its a twofer. Build something I want, and learn something new in the process.

A friend of mine once complained on twitter about how bad the Django Documentation was. I thought he was crazy, but now the script is flipped I wonder if its just a cultural thing. I am going to find out, but right now, the documentation sucks. I am finding hard to dig deep into how the magic works.

That’s another thing, I feel in some sense that Rails, just has a ton of magic baked in. I am assuming that a lot of this magic is due to the power or ruby to be so expressive. I think I just am waiting for that paradigm shift moment, where all of a sudden the light bulb goes off.

Other then that, I am liking the migrations out of the box. Django didn’t have a strong sense for this, things like south came along, but I did what all the other developers did and just wrote my own SQL migrations. When you sort of force the user to think about migrations, then migrations make more sense. Then the notion of rollback becomes as simple as issuing a command. I really like this idea. I hope I don’t find away around migrations, and make sure I flex that muscel as much as possible.

Especially when you start looking at continuous deployment, which is something I am looking at, making sure you can roll everything back becomes super important.