I haven’t posted a technical entry in a while. I’ve been busy, and have been working on cool stuff. I just haven’t had anything ready to post.

I’ve been working off and on with a buddy (classmate) from The Big Nerd Ranch. We attended the Ruby on Rails class over a year ago together, and have been in communication through the mailing list and email. His business is growing, which is great.

I spent the last week playing with Mephisto (a Rails blogging engine turned CMS). I thought it would be a good platform for a site that I may be about to work on.

I spent the last week fighting with Mephisto trying to get it to behave the way I want it to work in production on my host.

I am poking around a little with a second framework for ruby. I’ve spent the last year working in Ruby on Rails, and I really enjoy it. A couple of my classmates from the Big Nerd Ranch have been playing with a new framework called Merb. It looks interesting, and I think it will help me be a better programmer all around - better at Rails, too.

This past week marked an anniversary for me. We are in the midst of launching a massive project at work, and on October 22, 2007 I made a binder to help with testing this big system. Around that same time my coworker convinced (tricked?) me to learn ruby.

I participated in a lightening talk at the local Ruby Brigade meeting the other day. Nothing fancy - just a little recap on my Big Nerd Ranch experience.

The group is pretty smart, but I thought I was probably not the only nuby in the area, so it might be topical for someone else.

We use CVS at work. We have an app that a handful of people are working on. Deployment by hand kind of sucks.

No problem, I say. Capistrano works with CVS now. Hooray!

It does “work” inasmuch as it does not barf when you run cap. It doesn’t so much actually work, though. For me. The CVS command that it generates is crazy honked. Maybe my CVS is bad – it’s not you Capistrano, it’s me.

I Am A Big Nerd

I had seen a banner for the Big Nerd Ranch on a site somewhere back in December as I was plowing through the skateboard book, and I thought it was pretty clever. I actually thought it looked really great. I sort of filed it away and went on my merry way.