a story of frustration and redemption

In the last two days I feel like I’ve been through both the worst and best sides of being a software developer.

frustration:
Yesterday started off as a day of possibilities. Another day to build really great stuff that I’m proud of and hopefully helps a few people out. Instead it was riddled with a host of issues on my own laptop including a hosed Ruby 1.8.7 upgrade, Readline compile failures, $PATH issues, a crashing IDE and a general feeling of crankiness. A lot of people, including myself, have talked about how exciting it is to code, especially in Ruby. How the philosophy is so different, and it is. But I couldn’t help but get the feeling that software development in general is still in its infancy — that some things that should be simple are not. It feels like we are still hand-cranking the Model-T to get it started. We’ve come a long way and are helping a lot of people, but we’ve got a long way to go before we are driving an all-electric Mini Cooper.
» Continue reading “shoes to the rescue”

Up until recently I’ve hosted all of my hobby/small Rails sites at Textdrive. It was inexpensive, the documentation fairly thorough, and support was responsive. About a month ago, I started putting together another small Rails site. I built it locally and was ready to deploy to my server at TextDrive. However, the server had an old version of RubyGems, and I found out that wouldn’t be upgraded. My plan was being outmoded, and needed to upgrade my plan (aka, spend more) and move my code.

I really wasn’t in the mood to do this, and so I took the opportunity to look into some of the other services getting a lot of press lately: Namely the “managed” cloud services–those apps that use EC2 or other elastic services, but put a nice front end on more easily manage deployments. The following are some first impressions on each of the services I worked with:

» Continue reading “working in the clouds”

Just a quick note that we are moving our blog site from blogger to a local WordPress install.  The site may be down or look a bit odd tonight.