Daily Archive

This week I :

(1) Wrote and deployed a Sinatra App to Heroku to test Jeff Douglas’s code. It works! Link.

(2) Leveraged the Cinch framework to write an IRC Bot for the #salesforce IRC channel on Freenode. Please say hello to “Saasy” in the #salesforce channel and see what it can do.

(3) Wrote and deployed a simple Rails app (v. 3) to Heroku which displays the log from the IRC Bot (link edited 2/28/11).

Here are some takeaways:

(1) Getting started with Ruby can be a bit tough. There are often versioning issues and incompatibilities which can take a long time to solve. I was switching back between different versions of Ruby, Rails, and various gems — often finding that documentation was out of date. You also need to spend a fair amount of time on the command line, which can be difficult for folks used to a super IDE.

(2) Writing with Ruby is fun. Of course, there is a learning curve with anything, but there is a lot of syntactical sugar that makes writing Ruby one of my favorite things to do (once I get the hang of it).

(3) Heroku is awesome. I’ve written a couple Rails apps before but deployment was kind of pain. No longer! Heroku is super fun and super easy.

(4) The Ruby community is great. Even if sorting through blogs to find up-to-date instructions is not the most fun activity, there is tons of information out there and also lots of helpful people on various IRC channels (#heroku #ruby #cinch #rubyonrails).

So why not get started? For resources I highly highly recommend Peepcode, as well as the “Pickaxe”. For a (if you are doing Rails stuff, also the Agile Guide). For a quirkier, quicker, and in many ways more delightful (if not as comprehensive) approach, check out Why’s Guide to Ruby and learn the meaning of chunky bacon.

Special thanks to Domink Honnef, who provided helpful advice and put up with my safe harbor statement testing on the #cinch-bots channel, as well as aliasweird, apothecary, and others who made helpful suggestions re: the irc bot in #salesforce.