Thinking outside the box

Posted by Ben on July 10, 2007

Early today I was talking with Dean, our new Web Developer, about how I started hacking in Ruby. Like many Ruby hackers these days, I started off using Rails and then became more and more interested in Ruby. When I developed my first small Rails web application it was rather apparent at how much faster I could write clean, testable code. I also immediately began to wonder, how does Rails perform all of its magic?

The natural place to start looking was in the Rails source code. I was immediately impressed at how dynamic Ruby was. After I started to grasp the code base and some of the patterns, I started to fall in love with Ruby. The power of Rails lies in Ruby. I know there are plenty of other beautiful languages out there, but my background was mainly with c, C++, C#, Java, and PHP, so some of the Ruby features were quite new to me. After learning Ruby, I realized that my whole career, I was solving problems in a box. My problem solving and design skills were constrained by the programming language at my disposal. The dynamic power of Ruby opened that box and I now tackle problems in a new light. The more Ruby code I read the more my toolset grows and the more ways I can look at solving a problem.

I keep thinking, what will the next programming language be that changes the way I think this much? Is it something I can even imagine right now? It’s strange how paradigms shape our world and make it so difficult to think outside the box.

I am alive!

Posted by Ben on January 03, 2007

I just wanted post something really quick to let people know that I am still alive and kicking. The last couple months have been crazy with the new company and all.

Kevin Reeth from Intuit joined me and is running the business side of things while I am taking care of the technical side of things. We have been extremely busy. We are currently working on 3 Ruby on Rails projects and even met with Intuit today about adding a possible 4th project. With just the 2 of us, it is needless to say we are busy.

We have a lot of learnings to share and when we get a couple minutes to breath, I will post some, hopefully, useful articles.