Riding the rails with my ticket out of .NET hell

I took a job 4 years ago with the understanding I’d be working in Java, but then my team got re-orged into another group and I’ve been stuck doing C#, .NET, and COM interop ever since.

Ruby and RoR (Ruby on Rails) look like the perfect way for me to get back to my open source roots (Perl). I’d been picking up Python off and on, but since I’ve been looking at Ruby, I’m impressed. It’s as if Perl, Python, and Smalltalk had a menage a trois and had an offspring named Ruby.

I’m into chapter 5 of the pickaxe book and getting back some of the enthusiasm I felt when I first started programming. Time to get the joy back in this work, or ditch it and start a llama farm. Since I doubt I’ll be able to quit my day job just now, I need something that’s built for rapid development, and RoR is looking like it’s hit the sweet-spot.

I’ve got RoR, mod_ruby, and eruby installed on my powerbook, and I followed along with the blogging tutorial on the rails site. I plan to learn Ruby and RoR in parallel.

I’m hoping to attend OSCON in Portland this August, at least for some of the Ruby and RoR tutorials, though I hope to be far along by then, putting together my own site along with some ideas I have for live services.

See more progress on: learn ruby on rails