Working With Rails

Hello, I’m Jack Forrest!

I’m a sixteen year old web developer with four years of experience working with a wide variety of technologies. After specializing mostly in PHP for the past couple of years however, the introduction of Ruby to my arsenal made an impression on me about the way high level programming should be done. There’s no need to rant about the freedoms and possibilities that Ruby has opened up for me, but I will say that this technology will be my chief academic focus for the time being.

Along with the usual web developer’s toolkit of PHP, Perl, Python, Basic and of course, Ruby, I’ve picked up a lot of the low level hacking the comes along with configuring these technologies. The LAMP stack has been hammer and nails for the past couple of years, and I’ve become entirely familiar with basic Apache configuration, server side scripting, MySQL and the other little tidbits of technology needed to keep an application up and running. On the front end side of things, I’ve learned a bit about basic design, but stick to putting together modern XHTML and CSS rather than actually designing layouts. I’ve never exactly become one with my artistic side, and I don’t intend to start now. (Or at least as long as the market remains flooded with people who will do my design work in half the time that I would take to do it.)

Although I’ve been programming ruby for about sixth months now, I’ve just begun to familiarize myself with the Rails framework. Needless to say, I’m awed by the elimination of 90% of day to day CRUD programming which Rails makes possible, and also by the ease of use for large dev teams which the framework makes possible. Sure, I’ve put together my own little kits for PHP and Python to get things done, but of course none of these touch the extent which the Rails programmers have gone to, and I could never pretend to be able to put together such a well thought out and useful package. Rails is far more efficient and far more simple to work with than any other technology I have touched to date, and therefore, I intend to make use of it.