Ruby on Rails Limited Progress

So I’ve embarked on a mission to learn how to develop a somewhat complex web application soup to nuts. I don’t want to become a developer but my thought is if I can physically do every aspect of the business I’m interested in, then whatever role (whether it be sales, leadership, product, investor) I play I will be better at it if I can do it all….no matter how basic my ability is.

That said, learning is about honesty. Being honest with yourself on what your challenges are and know what you don’t yet know.

So here goes…..

I’ve spent the last month just figuring out how to install ruby on rails. My experience with php and codeignitor was waaay off the mark on getting started with ruby on rails. So ruby on rails means you work from the Command line and I was deathly afraid of working on the command line. As it turns out you need a lot of stuff and wherever you go some of the stuff leads to other stuff which leads to other stuff etc….

For example. You install ruby, then rails, then realize you can install a package with both, then you need webrick or maybe mongrel or maybe mongrel works with Apache or maybe Apache is not necessary…but maybe if you want to scale it is. Then you realize you could just be using heroku which has all of them. But Heroku in the books came with a UI and now it’s all command line. Good luck getting your app migrated over there to Heroku before you even created it.

So believe it or not I’ve figured out most of the above. Now I can install everything you need to get an app created and up and running. I can even deploy scaffolding and a user database and created a few controllers and models to validate data entry and recall. I’m also learning a lot about ActiveRecord…which is by the way pretty AWESOME!

So all in all right now I’ve made a lot of progress and am actually making stuff that works.

My big bottleneck right now is Git. Conceptually I understand it and when I was on a Windows machine I was sucessfully using it. I’ve since switched to Mac. Textmate, by the way, is a godsend and the way it works with the Terminal and just the whole Mac developing experience is increadible. But for some reason I can’t figure out Git, install it, create or find (if I did in fact create it) an ssh key. And without that you are shit out of luck when it comes to migrating your app to heroku or to an external server, which I still haven’t figured out.

Anyway, making progress and understanding a lot….and though hitting points of major frustration I understand what they mean when they say Ruby on Rails is more about configuration than coding and it’s super easy to get stuff built quickly……you just need to know a really lot and be able to learn really quickly.