My Life Blog

Just a few scattershooting notes from the Studio, that I didn’t include in my previous post.

The consensus development platform in the class seemed to be Mac OS X using the Textmate editor and using MySQL as the underlying database.  I believe this matches that of the core Rails team.  I noticed few Windows folks and the few that I did notice seemed to have a few problems.  I had none on my "preferred" platform.

As far as demographics go, we have 3 women out of our close to 50 attendees.  All attendees were caucasian.  At least, I think so.  I was somewhat surprised to see no Asian Indian presence at all.  My organization at work is dominated by Asian Indians, so I always feel like that’s representative of the development community.  Perhaps not.  One additional note, the mean age was probably between 32 and 35, but I have no empirical evidence to support that.

I would be remiss if I didn’t give props to my buddy Mike.  After making it to my hotel, my every transportation need was taken care of.  That includes an extraordinarily kind trip back to the airport which began at 6:15am on a Sunday.  As someone who values sleep, I consider that a profound demonstration of friendship.

Over and above the rides, it was just fun to spend time with an old friend.  Or shall I say a seasoned friend from several years ago.  Its amazing how you can go 7-8 years without spending significant time with someone and you begin again as if no time had passed. 

And finally, I had an instance of cry-laugh on the last day.  You know what that is, right?  A funny image popped into my head and I tried to describe it probably five different times.  But before I could get more than one or two words out, I would start laughing.  And finally, my eyes started to tear up.  Its funny to watch someone go through this and Mike even started laughing without knowing what I was even laughing about.  Those moments are priceless.  Unfortunately, I had the giggles the rest of the day and that’s not necessarily good when you sit in the second row of a class.

This past week I traveled to Denver to attend the Denver edition of the Rails Studio. 

First off, a tip for those who ever travel to Denver.  Research carefully your transportation options from the Denver airport to wherever you are staying.  In my case, I didn’t.  My airfare was $281.  My one-way cab fare to the hotel was $100.  Obviously, that’s just completely wrong.  The problem is that the airport is over 30 miles outside of Denver.

And now to the Studio itself.  I should start by saying that I have read Dave Thomas’ book in its entirety as well as much of the Wiki documentation on Rails.  I’ve even coded and deployed the smallest of applications.  I’m not sure if that makes me moderately skilled or what, but I can say that I’m familiar with most of the Rails concepts.

In considering attending the Studio, I informally used the following thought process: the book costs $30 dollars or so and the Studio costs $1000+.  As such, the Studio must provide a superset of the content already provided by the book.  Its basically simple math, I guess.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.  In my view, the Studio taught a subset of the book with few exceptions.  So I must say up front that I was pretty disappointed in the Studio.

On the positive  side, Dave Thomas and Mike Clark prepared a very nice set of course materials and generally worked through them efficiently.  There were a few live coding difficulties, but thats to be expected.  In addition, it ran very smoothly from a logistics and facilities perspective.  The networking opportunities were good as well…I went out to dinner with a 8 of the 50 attendees over two nights. 

But in the end, I did not come away with anything that I had not already learned from the book.  Well, I take that back, database migrations were not covered in the book and that was new.  However, that’s hardly worth the differential in price.  I keep wondering if I had unrealistic expectations.  Was it wrong to assume that the author of the book would simply represent the book contents for a price that was 35 times more?  I was so sure that new stuff would be taught.

So for anyone reading this who has an interest in Rails and is considering training, my advice would be to read the book and any online documentation for now.  Of course, if you need to have your hand held through such an introduction then the Studio is perfect for that.  I just wouldn’t expect to receive any advanced instruction just yet.

As for Rails itself, I’m fairly enthusiastic about it.  Anything that I write independently from my day job will surely be done in Rails.  It just makes sense since I have no initial integration needs or legacy issues.  As for its applicability within my company, I’m not sure.  We’re such a Java shop that it will be hard to successfully champion Rails.  But since we are interested in rapid prototyping, I’m pretty sure I can work it in under that pretense.  And who knows, maybe in prototyping it will be recognized that some of our simpler apps should just be done in Rails.

As I prepared to watch the Rose Bowl, I puzzled over who to pull for.  As an Aggie, there are almost no cases where you’d ever pull for tu.  Yes, its tu.  Aggies don’t give them credit for being "the university" of Texas.  That’s rather arrogant, we think.

But alas, my Texas state pride and my Big XII pride kicked in and swung me in the direction of Texas.  My twisted mind also thought that if tu won, then when A&M beat them next year, it’d be all that much sweeter.  But who am I kidding?  Texas without Vince Young is still exponentially better than A&M.  Though it must be said, I think A&M was their 2nd toughest game this year.

I am not an Aggie turncoat.  But if others think so, at least I am not alone as the picture below proves.  And no, I don’t need my own shirt, so thanks anyway.