Into the Realm of Elves (.net >> rails)

Introduction to My Journey

I'm biting the bullet and learning Rails today. I would be at GRDevDay but didn't get the ticket before they were sold out. So while you are all learning some cool stuff I will do the same. The latest version of the book "Agile Web Dev w/ Rails" just showed up on my kindle and I'm going to take a shot. Yesterday I tweeted...

Chadrick Mahaffey @chadrickm I feel like I'm a human venturing into a dark forest trying to follow elves (.net to #rails).

And if elves were real and we lived in some fantasy realm, Rails might seem to me like a strange magic (were talking high fantasy here) to us humans (.net developer using a windows machine). I'm some kind of explorer who knows there is amazing things to discover, but I'm a bit afraid of the journey. I did just watch Avatar with the family and perhaps that analogy would work as well. We will stick with fantasy for now. It will hopefully keep me entertained enough to continue writing the journey out.

I am developing alone today simply because I have not sought out a pair to enter this realm with yet. Perhaps I will find a native at some point who can take me deeper into the forest.

What version do I have?

I know I've installed Rails before. I had to at CodeMash for a pre-compiler event I went to. Let's see what I have.

$ gem list --local rails

So I have 3.2.9 and it appears I might not be able to get 4.0.0.beta1 using windows. So until I invest in a new maGIc book I'll be a bit behind the time, but this is fine for now.

Learning to Use Hand Incantations Again (cmd and SublimeText2)

Yeah, the elves are pretty hard core users of only hand incantations and the forest itself, where we outsiders have become dependent on our wands and scrying pools to do pretty much everything. It's not bad and I've been doing it more and more since using git rather than hg of late.

I love this Tome's advise for us humans when it comes to the IDE. "here's the point in the book where we recommend you sit down..." NO IDE?!? I knew that already. Not a huge surprise here but it is a big reason I have not gotten to this sooner.

I'm in the forest now. Time to summon something.

With a couple simple incantations I have summoned my first app and attempt to contact the natives.

OK - I'm on my way now ;)