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Rob Biedenharn
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Tue, 31-Jan-2006
RailsDay 2005
Well, it's not too often that I feel that I'm the lightweight of a programming team, but when working alongside Jim Weirich and John Wilger on a 24hr marathon using Ruby on Rails that was what I expected. I don't think it turned out too bad. I'd only picked up Rails a few times between a couple XP-Cincinnati meetings and two different Rails tutorials. Going into RailsDay I knew I would learn a lot, but even I was surprised.
John, Jim, and I met Friday night at Panera to write up some story cards (we considered using actual napkins, but went with Jim's 4x6 index cards). At the time it seemed like a very good idea ‑ John wanted to jump right in at Midnight and Jim and I were comfortable with beginning at 7am. I think we ended up completing only about one-third of the cards and realized by Saturday evening that YAGNI is a very important concept. We undid or threw out several bits and pieces that turned out to be too much to do in a single 24hr session.
The day turned out to be much more about Rails than about Ruby. I never had to refer to my pickaxe book (did I mention that I was sitting next to Jim?), but needed to jump into the Rails API docs several times particularly as the contest was approaching the end. I have a tremendously enhanced understanding of the Rails framework now ‑ some of the magic has been laid bare, but I feel that I've only glimpsed its true power.
We were able to get some of the Ajax features in place; crudely, but that's due to time constraints as much as anything. Of course, there were many things that we didn't even start. (YAGNI!) Tests were at times extremely useful and we realized that testing probably should have been given more attention throughout the day. (Yes, Scott, we're listening.)
Both teams are grateful to Mark Mansour of Fusion Alliance and Lisa Kaminski of SARK for securing the meeting room, providing breakfast and lunch, and lending moral support.
Well, I'm going to show off JEWEL to my family now and then take a peek at some of the other projects (when their server resumes working).