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Books, Harddrives and Rails

So what’s been going on in the world of Andrew recently?

Not a huge amount really! I’ve been working hard and keeping my head down, I’ve been learning lots of new things and spending hours pouring over computer books and my laptop, and I’ve been finding it hard to must up the effort to write as well as think of anything to write about.

I bought a load of new books just recently and I’ve been reading more than ever, my newest ones include:

Programming Ruby, Ship It!, Practices of an Agile Developer, Interface-Oriented Design and The Long Tail.

All of which are really interesting, I especially love the format of books from the Pragmatic Programmers, they are so easy to read and yet cram a huge amount of knowledge and expertise into each book, I highly recommend anything from the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

I also got the 3 disc edition of Spaced on DVD and Shawn of the dead after seeing Hot Fuzz in the cinema, they’re not exactly new but still a great watch.

After a number of incorrect orders over the past month which I couldn’t be bothered to return or complain about I ended up with two 250GB SATA hard drives and no way to use or connect them to my macbook so I bought a couple USB/ESATA external cases from Scan which is an excellent computer hardware shop online, they even sent me text when the item was successfully delivered!

With the extra space and use of the SATA drives I can finally access my 400+ episodes of Simpsons and loads of other awesome films and TV shows I had “obtained” whilst I was at uni so I’ve got more than enough content to watch now, I’ve completely stopped watching normal TV.

The main reason for my lack of blogging is that I’ve got my head so deep inside ruby on rails that I can hardly think of anything else! I’ve built some really cool stuff and got the hang of all the basic rails stuff so I’m starting to develop some real apps.

And boy is it fast, once I translate an idea into a database scheme it really comes together fast, the main structure and shell is up and working within a few hours (much more than just scaffolding) which tends to create something quite strange.

Because you’ve whipped up the app before you have time to over-think the concept the whole aim of it can shift really quickly, new features and so many changes and improvements come to mind that would have never happened until you got your hands a working prototype.

To go with rails I’ve signed up for a slice of VPS from Slicehost.com, it comes across as a very nice system.

I’ve only had it for a couple days and I’m still getting to grips with running ubuntu over SSH and trying to grasp the rather complex act that is deploying a rails app which is getting easier thanks to deprec and capistrano but it’s still no-where near as easy as php but I’ll forgive it as the speed and ease of development more than makes up for it.

If anyone has any useful tutorial links or cheat sheets they would be very much appreciated.