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.NET to Rails Survival Guide!

Let’s turn back time (not too far) to the summer of 2005, when I first discovered Ruby on Rails. A MCSD for .NET, I had been working professionally with Microsoft development technologies for about 11 years. With laptop under my arm, I was ready to take on pretty much any software development challenge, whether it be web site, Windows app, heck, even stuff for Tablet PC and Windows Mobile. I was pretty confident in my ability to do pretty much anything .NET-related, and get it done quickly. Bring it on, clients!

Then I discovered Rails. My world was turned upside-down. Everything I *thought* I knew about web development changed. I no longer had the snuggly comfort of Visual Studio, Intellisense, and all the tools I knew how to use so well. I was enamored with Ruby and Rails, but what about all this other stuff? Linux? Apache? Subversion? MySQL? Huh?

So, I thought it might be fun to write about this “other stuff”. There are plenty of great tutorials out there about how to get going with the Ruby language and with Rails, so I’ll leave that to the experts. I’ll just outline how I broke out of my .NET comfort zone and out into the wild.

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Me, January 2006. Found in a Word doc written as a draft of the first blog post of what later would become Softies on Rails.

"You’re continuing to make a classic mistake: thinking you’re something different than what everyone believes you are. You’re not a DVD company and a streaming company: you’re where I go to watch movies. That’s it."

Comment by Jeremiah Cohick on Netflix’s announcement that they’ll be separating the DVD and streaming parts of their business.

"Living with one child is like living with a demanding, but mostly reasonable, roommate who really likes spending time with you until she goes to bed early. Having two or more children is like living in a circus where all the performers are deaf."

drblast on Hacker News

There's a Horse in the Apple Store →

I absolutely adore this story. Illustrates how numb our society has become to things that are truly remarkable.

"Companies don’t get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide. Office 2010 will be the end of Zoho, if we stop innovating, stop being nimble and flexible in our business model. Then again, if we stop all that, Zoho will die anyway, no Office 2010 needed to do the job."

Zoho, on Office 2010 as a direct competitor

I live in fear

Derek Sivers’ post entitled ‘I assume I’m below average’ has been making the rounds in the last couple of days. His post struck a nerve with me, since I have always had a similar but slightly different philosophy.

I live in fear. Not quivering-in-the-back-of-the-closet, sucking-my-thumb-late-at-night kind of fear. Fear that my competitors, with their mountains of cash, are secretly working on making their product awesome so they can destroy me. Fear that they are better than it than I am. Fear that my customers are currently evaluating whether my product is worth renewing for another year. Fear that they will suddenly realize they are working with this tiny little shitty company of mine. Fear that there’s some new technology that makes mine obsolete.

Recognizing and dealing with that fear makes me way better at what I do.

View high resolution

The office. Working from home isn’t typically as good as it sounds. But today, yes.

Resurrection

Been working so heads-down for the past two years, haven’t been blogging. This is my half-assed attempt to get it going again. Stay tuned.

Oh, and I decided to delete all my previous posts (which were just random postings from Delicious and Twitter). How to bulk delete 700 posts from Tumblr? Ruby to the rescue. Via.