Last day of the studio was pretty good though there was a bit of a rush to get through and finish on time. Credit to Dave and Mike, though, because they did despite Dave nearly hacking up his lungs coughing so much. Room was dead air because the HVAC was shut down per standard office building practice on a weekend. Didn’t help but not too bad. Don’t want to forget Nicole Clark (yes, Mike’s wife), the woman behind the throne so to speak, who made sure we had all the necessities including personal printed certificates of completion before departure.
James Duncan Davidson, a Java guru converted to Rails, was also in class most of yesterday and all of today which came in very handy when we got to discussing deployment and production issues. Most of the sentiment is behind using LightTPD (which has FastCGI built in) rather than Apache if possible was the web server. And no doubt at all about using SwitchTower; I’d be surprised if it was integrated into the core Rails release package soon enough; its so powerful and decoupled from Rails that plenty of people in other language camps including Java, Python and PHP are starting to use it too.
One subject covered that’s newer than the Rails book but profoundly useful is Migrations. I’ve programmed in plenty of languages before but I don’t recall a single one which has a similar facility, so another big plus for RoR. Migrations are a semi-automated means to manage changes in an application’s database structure as the development cycle rolls on. Change a field type, add a new column, table or index? Just generate a new migration file and fill out up and down methods (the down are used to rollback to previous versions). Need to move to a different database, server or send your code to another programmer, they just run Rake migrate and their database is equal to yours.
Easy drive to the airport, good company from Dan Shafer, and arrived two hours before boarding. Literally no line at the security checkpoint for a change, the checkers were waiting on me to open my laptop bag and get my shoes off! Plenty of time to chow down on a Wolfgang Puck mushroom and and basil pizza and enjoy soething cold from Starbucks. One fly in this ointment, though: No Verizon cell signal in the LAX terminal, which I don’t understand since 16 people sitting around me are yapping on theirs! No Wi-Fi LittleSteven can see either.
Can’t wait to start using all the Rails goodness that are now mashed into my brain!
BillSaysThis 