Lance Albertson Musings of a UNIX SysAdmin, jazz lover, and wine/beer snob

Happy Holidays, ruby on rails, and … thunderstorms?

I've been spending the last week back home in northeast Kansas with my family for the holidays. I thankfully missed the snowpocalypse in Portland by ONE DAY and had an uneventful flight to Kansas. If I would have decided to leave one day later, I probably would have been stuck in Oregon for another 2-3 days. Talk about being lucky!

Somehow I didn't escape wacky weather totally. In the last four days, the temperature has gone from 15F to 45F to 67F to 27F. Only in Kansas will you have balmy weather one day and snow/ice the next (literally). Not to mention, I even got to experience a thunderstorm late last night! This type of weather never happens in Oregon so its nice to have some variety like this once in a while!

I've done a surprisingly good job of not doing any work related things while on vacation. The only things I've done have been taking care of a few minor issues and replied to a few tickets so that clients don't think we're totally ignoring them. I really needed this break so its been pretty refreshing.

The only tech related project I've been doing lately is getting familiar with calagator (an open source calendar aggregator used by the PDX tech community), and also even teaching myself Ruby and Ruby on Rails (RoR). I must be a nerd to use my downtime to teach myself something new like this.

I've always had this negative view on RoR mainly because of the past experience I've had and heard from other people. Setting up a server to run a rails app its quite different than something like php. Not to mention that there's a lot of wrong ways to run the application. I've always heard and even experienced performance issues with rails applications, but it seems to have changed in the last year or so.

I've had several great online chat conversations with Igal Koshevoy in the last few days talking about the various issues that Ruby and Rails has had over the last few years. It seems as though the RoR community has worked pretty hard to try and combat a lot of the bad PR its had and fixed many of the technical faults it had. They've even gone so far as to fork the Ruby source into a project called Ruby Enterprise Edition. It includes some important performance fixes and other various improvements that benefit RoR applications. Overall, I'm fairly impressed with the design and simplicity of Rails for web applications. I can see the appeal for it from a development point of view. Now I just need to play with the backend some more to find an ideal way to host it.

I'm heading to Kansas City and Topeka in the next few days to see some more friends. I haven't seen some of these friends in a few years so it'll be a nice finale to a great holiday vacation! I head back to Oregon next Tuesday and can't wait to get back to town. I actually miss the rain :)