Of Work and Ruby...
October 25, 2005 @ 03:51 PMToday was a fun day at work. There’s something to be said for enjoying what you do. I was able to take a dreaded assignment and turn it in to something I love. Legitimately, too. We’re building essentially a touch-screen application for a point-of-sale system. Not literally for retail sales, these machines are designed for use by casinos at their tables. So my job is to build this application for this point-of-sale system. Originally it was requested that I do this using flash and Internet Explorer embedded into a custom app.
I’m not a fan of Flash or IE. I’m not very GOOD at Flash either. So, after thoroughly investigating the requirements of the application, I realized that I could put the thing together much faster as a standard web-based application. It would require some pretty intense JavaScript, yes… lots of AJAX, lots of CSS positioning… All stuff I want to learn. So, I set up a quick demo of my idea, and thankfully the powers that be quickly agreed. Earlier today we ran into a roadblock building that application on IE. It simply wasn’t going to do what we needed, so now we’re going to deploy to Firefox.
So, I went from Flash on IE to AJAX-enabled web-app on Firefox. Life is good.
Ruby in the rough…
So, my first week with Ruby has gone well, I think. I’m still learning the ins and outs of the language, but I can tell I’m going to like it. I started reading a Ruby on Rails book, but I realized that I wasn’t actually learning how Ruby worked. So I put that book down and started over with a Ruby book. It’s a little frustrating to be writing “Hello world” applications, but I’m slowly figuring this language out. I’ve never been in to dynamically-typed languages (as in, I’ve never used them heavily), so that’s a new experience for me. From what I can tell, the Ruby developer community is awesome. I signed up for the Seattle Ruby group… maybe I’ll attend one of the meetings soon…
Anyway, it’s late, I gotta sleep.