About this RailsCraft blog

Getting started

After 5 years of using Ruby on Rails, it's time to share what I've learned about making applications work, especially when using multifarious gems, plugins, engines, and random open source sorcery.
I have written 6 full-scale RoR applications, almost all of which run on Heroku's excellent platform. I'm technical support for about 15 RefineryCMS sites (RefineryCMS is a RoR open source CMS).
And today [08-Feb-2012], I just launched my newest SaaS offering, Majozi -- a duty-roster scheduling app for non-profits and small businesses.

Brute Force

Three years ago, as I was getting my groove going with RoR, I an engineering friend rather disparagingly accused me of brute force. In my earlier years of software engineering (complex realtime multitask embedded systems), I was rather proud of my elegant and efficient designs. His remark wounded me at the time.
Now, I wear the BruteForce badge proudly. It is not easy to pull together original design, open source gems, and a constantly changing Rails platform and make everything work in a professional application built against realworld time & budget constraints.
So, this blog will be sharing what I've learned to make it all just work. Brute force is where the elegant meets the dirty road of real applications and gets there on time.

A promise

I hope you'll never read these words in this blog: "it's really easy, just do..." Every time I read those words in a tutorial blog I cringe from all the times it wasn't easy, didn't work, the instructions were insufficient, or the example was so trivial as to be worthless.

Note: I'm importing all the archived blog posts from my tumblr blog; this one was originally published 08-Feb-2012.