Digging in With Rails

It’s the end of our first full week of development on our big Rails experiment, and I couldn’t be happier with how things are going. We have 90% of the admin interface done (user management, static page stuff, moderation, etc), have user logins working using a really cool upcoming AOL open API (should be able to talk more about it later this week, but it’s one of the best web services I’ve ever used and I’m not saying that because I work there), and users can edit their own content now in a limited manner.\
Rails makes things so easy. It takes all the obnoxious bits out of building web apps: the plumbing. I no longer have to write hundreds of lines of code before I can actually do anything important.\
This is also my first experience with Subversion, and I’m loving that too. We’ve been using svnX, and I’m loving that too. It took a minute to get used to, but I love smart mode. It tells me what I’ve changed so I don’t have to go digging for it to make sure I’ve checked everything in (so Jason can keep his stuff in sync and mostly working).\
We’re still planning on launching before SxSW. wish us luck.

By Kevin Lawver

Web developer, Software Engineer @ Gusto, Co-founder @ TechSAV, husband, father, aspiring social capitalist and troublemaker.