I've been wanting to start a Ruby on Rails blog for a while to document my experiences using the framework and engage with the community, but always felt I wouldn't have enough time to maintain it. Today I decided to give in and begin RailsGarden.com.

So just about every developer working with Rails professionally has a life story culminating in total infatuation with the Ruby language and Rails framework; here's mine:

Having starting programming at an early age with a continual and early interest in computers in general, I quickly latched onto web programming because of the relative ease and the potential to create something decent without a whole lot of work. I first dabbled in Perl and at one point developed a small data-driven e-commerce application that powered a very early version of www.rarenewspapers.com. Looking forward to the newer web technologies of the time, I began learning PHP and MySQL. Relational databases and techniques to structure and store data well has always intrigued me. To this day, modeling databases and advanced database structures are my specialty. I began doing some basic projects for a few clients online while still in high school. The projects I took on increased in complexity as I gained better design patterns and my own personal coding stuff. Most of these projects were for a company I am still deeply involved with, Digital Peach Interactive, based out of Georgia. I also dabbled a bit in Adobe ColdFusion and ASP.NET with SQL Server

My use of PHP to architect web applications culminated in the design and implementation of a large internal content management system used at Digital Peach, implementing advanced features such as a very sophisticated hierarchical category system for permissions and a workflow engine. Building this application with my boss was quite an experience and the data model ended up consisting of over 130 tables, including tables for some of our main modules.

Having done quite a bit with PHP and become pretty proficient in using it and MySQL to build data-driven applications, I wasn't particularly "happy" with what I did and didn't derive a lot of intellectual satisfaction out of building software in PHP. This all changed when I began to look at Ruby on Rails, a technology I very ignorantly ignored for so long. My first experience with RoR was viewing the standard make a blog screen cast and a few of the online slide shows. Though initially skeptical of the framework due to scalability and extensibility concerns (due to my superficial understanding), I decided to purchase the standard Agile Development with Ruby on Rails book. Reading this book was like a constant barrage of "aha!" moments, page after page. It would be difficult to find another tech book that had such a high ratio of information to pages; every page is packed full of useful information, ready for immediate application.

Already very excited about the prospects of using Rails as a framework, I still felt inadequate in my understanding of the framework and how it worked under the hood. Everything in Rails to me seemed like magic and it was insufficient for me to know that "has_many" established as one-to-many relationship with another model - I had to know why this was possible. This lead me to pick up the Programming Ruby pickaxe book which is an essential resource for really understanding the Ruby language.

I still am a strong believer in the Ruby language itself. The Rails framework is excellent, but ultimately what allows Rails to be so well-constructed is the extremely dynamic nature of the Ruby language. Engineering software components in Ruby is extremely enjoyable. Sometimes I think that Rails developers put too much emphasis on the Rails side and not enough on the Ruby side. I find that such emphasis also leads a lot of newcomers to Rails with an insufficient understanding of the Ruby language to dismiss the framework for this or that reason. Ultimately a complete and thorough understanding of the Ruby language is essential for appreciating many capabilities of using Rails as a framework for sufficiently large applications.

After these two books which have changed my life, I began reading other Rails/Ruby books to acquire more knowledge and gain better insight into the techniques used my professional Rails developers. Rails blogs were also an essential resource.

The rest, they say, is history! I've been using Ruby on Rails ever since, from small to large projects (such as Timothy Hughes Rare & Early Newspapers, which I'll discuss in the future with this blog), and i'm learning something new every day. Working on the larger projects has really pushed me into new directions with Rails and helped me to establish a much better picture of the tools, plugins, and resources available to me when building software.

And so it is my goal with Rails Garden to document some of the tools and techniques I use in my professional use of Ruby on Rails. Enjoy!