New Job, More Rails
New Job
Last week I started at OnForce as a PHP developer. They use a homegrown MVC framework to manage a huge and functionally rich system that connects small & independent service providers with service requestors. At the moment, the system seems devoted to the tech support realm, but I suspect we’ll be expanding into new industries soon.
On my first day, I walked into the office to see a 24″ screen (exactly like Sam’s) waiting for me. The machine was running some flavor of Windows, but the first thing the boss asked me was “What OS do you want?”. I thought that was rad, and I chose Ubuntu. A download, a burn, and a few keystrokes later, the guys in the office were all helping me get the X server working with the video card & monitor. It seems where SUSE and Fedora (other machines in the office) had succeeded in getting the same hardware to work automatically, Ubuntu failed. But, the xorg.conf from the Fedora machine worked perfectly, and I was up-and-running fairly quickly. Moral: if you’re struggling with graphics configuraion in Ubuntu, and you know someone on another Linux flavor with the same hardware, try stealing their /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
So far, I’ve gotten a chance to poke around the code, get a feel for the framework, and test-drive their Zend development suite. As an IDE, Zend is pretty cool. I think I’ll continue to do my heavy text editing in vim, but I’ll keep Zend open (which automatically reloads the file when I save it in vim) for debugging purposes, and to use the version control plugins.
The guys I work with seem to really know their stuff, and we have a great view.
Rails stuff
I upgraded Rails on my home server. I had to uninstall the Ubuntu Rails package, install RubyGems, and re-install Rails as a gem. Then the new Rails version told me it didn’t like Ruby 1.8.3, so I uninstalled the Ubuntu Ruby package and installed 1.8.4 from the makefiles.
Rails 1.1 did not break my current rails application. I did, though. After I ran rails in my application directory, I forgot to set the correct permissions on the newly generated directories, got confused, and before you know it I had nuked the whole application and started over. Probably for the best, though, because I notice a few positive differences in the scaffolds produced by 1.1.2. I used a subversion tag to hold onto the nuked version, and hand-written code from the old version worked fine when I copied & pasted it to the new app.
My favorite Ruby documentation is, currently, the builtin references in the online version of Programming Ruby. The ruby-doc site has a similar resource. In terms of Rails documentation, I’ve found I consult the ActiveRecord page in the Rails Wiki most often.
