Okay, I’ll warn you in advance: this is very nerdy/geeky. So, if you have no interest or knowledge of back-end web development then you should probably just stop reading right now and move on to the next post. :)
I’m excited because I finally got Ruby On Rails running today! I’m using Ubuntu Linux running through VMware as a sort of sandbox for my more experimental development stuff, that way I can quickly restore and repair if I screw something up! Last week I successfully got Apache, PHP and mySQL all installed, configured and running, then got a CMS I’m testing (MODx, looks good!) installed and running as well. This week, after two weeks of head scratching and bashing (no pun intended, for you command line geeks), I finally got both Ruby and Rails working!
Man, were my Unix skills out of shape. I had to look up the syntax for chmod. *blush*
Now comes the fun part! (Well, it’s fun if you’re a programming nerd like me and enjoy poking around in new languages.) Time to start learning Ruby On Rails development! I don’t know that I need another language on my list, but it certainly can’t hurt! Plus, it’s become the hot buzzword environment for Web 2.0 development, so being able to develop in it just might help land a nice development job! (Hello Silicon Valley!)
Which gets back to thinking once again about the next steps for my career. Do I want to push further on the creative side and move more towards pure design? Do I want to set the creative stuff aside and go full-on developer? A balance (if that’s even possible) of the two?
More things to meditate on…