Last Friday was the best one of the year. The blue sky, the warm weather, the cars racing… and so on. This one is going to be the most quiet of the year.
Bosses ar not here, I plan to code only one thing (an FTP transfer extension to the reporting tool used here), and I won’t go to the car meeting and races tonight.

I spent a lot of time diving into Ruby on Rails world so that I’d be able to have something to show, mid-September, and pass the final exams. So I worked until unusual hours (4:00 am, 00:30 am, 3:15 am) and have done much (mostly the interface) so far. Yesterday I fell asleep early (I was in bed at 11 pm) so I’m not a zombie today.

My interest for Rails started back in September or October of the previous year, when I was looking for something that could help me design portable interface, dreaming of a browser connecting to a local tiny webserver. The friend who taught me IRC (at a guild-master level), who also lead me to code Ruby, then told me about RoR. It’s fate.
Since, I have taken a look at it (the Agile Web Development with Rails book is worth reading), played a bit with AJAX calls and stuff, but nothing really big or production-class.
I choosed to use Rails to develop two websites : yaib.net and yaib.org (note that these aren’t links, their content isn’t online yet) and present that work for the project exam of my night courses.

So it serves three goals : learn the Rails framework, pass my exams and advertise for my Ruby written IRC bot YAIB.
Now that I’m dealing with it daily (er… nightly), even if I am not using much of ActiveRecord’s capabilities (the database I designed is really… basic), I can speak a little more about it :
It’s clearly fantastic. Every time I search how to do something, there’s an elegant solution provided directly by Rails, when not by Ruby itself. Not only Rails helps you design quickly and code elegantly, it leads you to think different (so yes, there is a little adaptation phase before you’re fully effective), and develop better.
Of course, Rails has limitations : no support of stocked procedures (but it’s not what it aims at ; its goal is to abstract the database layer, all data-related logic is contained in the model and has to be handled there), no multiple database support either.

But it does what it’s done for : develop database-backed web applications.
At this point, I believe J2EE and PHP are not really challengers. The market isn’t exactly the same, and, of course, one should use what he feels comfortable with.

So, I’ll spend the next weeks working hard on it, trying not to neglect the French Ruby users association in which I’m involved as the current secretary.
When I have finished yaib.net and yaib.org, I’ll have to put them online, so if you know a good Rails hosting plan, drop me a line below.

Note : Yesterday, on IRC, just before I quitted, Forth told me he liked my new blog. Thanks to you friend !

Companies call me on a regular basis to offer me job opportunities, after they saw my profile on Monster.fr. Great.

I have a second chance to present my night courses project on September 12th. Great.

I keep on hanging on #obsd @ Freenode with cool guys. Great.

So I gonna have a new job before Chistmas (if I decide to leave this one without having found the ONE GOOD JOB), have much work to achieve (the two Rails projects I’ll present are to be re-designed) and fun (sng, brandini and the others are definitely worth knowing).

Here is how I like to start my day : a good breakfast and listen to “Liberti Fatali” (from Final Fantasy VIII OST, the orchestral version is simply beautiful) while driving to work.

Long time no updates here, because I was really busy. On the other hand, who reads this blog ? I applied to using Google Analytics so that I’ll discover it.

The Summer is about to start, I’ll soon have my last exams (human resources management) and take three weeks holidays.

Not too bad. Except I have no money to spend any more It doesn’t matter, I have much to code !