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.

Here are the slides:

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 never found any documentation on what variables were available for the setting either. I did look at the source code of Capistrano, though.

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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.

I've recently picked up ruby and rails, and I really dig it. We do a lot of scripting and site stuff, so this would be great. I also do some work on the side, and had already started planning how to redo the insanity of my PHP and Perl sites in Rails.

I got to the point where I had sort of hit a plateau, though. This was about the same time we were planning training for the year at work. There happened to be a Big Nerd Ranch RoR Bootcamp a couple of weeks away, and I jumped on it.

The price was a bit of an issue for us. At my Large Multinational Corporation we do our budgets with separate lines for travel, food, lodging, and training. This would hit the training budget pretty hard. If you break it down, though, it's really not a bad price. I figured the actual training probably cost $2000 - $2500 when you factor in the room and board. And how do you put a price on unlimited access to the instructor and other smart people in the class?

My boss (and my boss's boss) were generous enough to make it happen. Off I go.

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