Ruby (on Rails)

Ruby on Rails is probably the first frontend framework I ever used. I think I dabbled in Perl a bit in a college course, cgi-bin style. But even in college, I worked on a project for a digital choral music library, where I created a Ruby on Rails app that had forms (that validated!) and stored data in a SQL database using ActiveRecord!

My first job was in Java, but I remained very curious about Rails and even just regular Ruby itself. At one point I even coded an "open source" abstract strategy game called Tanbo, with a full GUI implemented with WxWidgets. It even had a CPU that you could play against which used (checks notes) something called a UCT method (Upper Confidence bounds applied to Trees). From reading that Wikipedia article now, it was actually kind of cutting edge at the time.

I like Ruby. I think it's a very concise and expressive language. I also think it's a very powerful language, with it's systems of operator overloading and custom operators and monkey-patching. The problem is, when you have a big enough project, it can be impossible to tell where certain behavior is coming from. A class? A superclass? A monkey patch? Even basic Rails, out-of-the-box, create new Rails app projects can have this problem.

The most recent Ruby on Rails coding I've done is for the "headless CMS" for best albums in the universe. This is a Rails 7 app solely for me, but I still tried to style it a bit and make the error messages helpful, so that I wouldn't dread using it. I even use Capistrano to both deploy new versions of the admin/headless app itself, and deploy the finished static site.

I haven't really kept up with Ruby on Rails development past that, though I know there's been a lot of churn with regards to webpack/etc and how to best integrate Javascript/Typescript and Single Page Applications.