AlternateIdea: Thanks Rails for costing me part of my 9-5

July 21st, 2005

Thanks Rails for costing me part of my 9-5

0 comments on 370 words

Sometimes I feel like this: “http://www.exobit.org/”:http://www.exobit.org/ (via “neror.com”:http://blog.neror.com).

Good news is I’ve talked to the man and scaled back to 3 days a week. I owe a big portion of this to “Rails”:http://rubyonrails.com and “Typo”:http://typo.leetsoft.org. It wasn’t necessarily that I did anything super cool or one of a kind, hell it wasn’t like I did much at all. It’s just the exposure that Typo and Rails brought to me. Both surrounded me with intelligent, creative and passionate people.

Opensource has allowed me to take the first steps in getting away from the 9-5 and for that I’m grateful.

Reflecting on how I was brought to Rails, it was purely coincidental. I had been working with “Mojavi 3”:http://mojavi.org for about 6 months and was starting to feel a little discontent about the direction Mojavi was heading. Mojavi is a great framework with a brilliant developer, but for some reason he chose to keep the core project locked down tight and wasn’t real open with the community in the direction he was taking Mojavi. This isn’t a shot at Sean or Mojavi, but it was the feeling I walked away with.

I was browsing the Mojavi forum one day and spotted a link to a framework called “Ruby on Rails”:http://rubyonrails.com. I thought “What the hell, I’ll check it out”. I never knew that would be the one click that would end my career as a php developer and also allow me to work more for myself and less for someone else.

Sorry, comments are closed for this article.

Justin develops iPhone and Mac software over at Labrat Revenge by night and by day he is the Design Director for entp, the company behind Lighthouse, Warehouse, and Mephisto. You can check out his dated portfolio for a peek of what he's done.

Beautifully simple issue tracking and project management. With a beautiful Mac-like interface, email and subversion integration, Lighthouse is the perfect project management tool. We took the suck out of issue tracking.

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```
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```
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DoubleClick and Define using Apple Dictionary


var selection;
if(window.getSelection)
  selection = window.getSelection();
else if(document.selection)
  selection = document.selection.createRange();

document.observe("dblclick", function() {
  if(navigator.userAgent.include("Macintosh")) {
      location.href = "dict://" + selection;
    }
});

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Object.extend(Date.prototype, {
  strftime: function(format) {
    var day = this.getUTCDay(), month = this.getUTCMonth();
    var hours = this.getUTCHours(), minutes = this.getUTCMinutes();
    function pad(num) { return num.toPaddedString(2); };

    return format.gsub(/\%([aAbBcdDHiImMpSwyY])/, function(part) {
      switch(part[1]) {
        case 'a': return $w("Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat")[day]; break;
        case 'A': return $w("Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday")[day]; break;
        case 'b': return $w("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")[month]; break;
        case 'B': return $w("January February March April May June July August September October November December")[month]; break;
        case 'c': return this.toString(); break;
        case 'd': return this.getUTCDate(); break;
        case 'D': return pad(this.getUTCDate()); break;
        case 'H': return pad(hours); break;
        case 'i': return (hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12; break;
        case 'I': return pad((hours === 12 || hours === 0) ? 12 : (hours + 12) % 12); break;
        case 'm': return pad(month + 1); break;
        case 'M': return pad(minutes); break;
        case 'p': return hours > 11 ? 'PM' : 'AM'; break;
        case 'S': return pad(this.getUTCSeconds()); break;
        case 'w': return day; break;
        case 'y': return pad(this.getUTCFullYear() % 100); break;
        case 'Y': return this.getUTCFullYear().toString(); break;
      }
    }.bind(this));
  }
});

UPDATE: Bugs fixed. Thanks Andrew and Stephen

Also, some of my old and new code has been posted on GitHub. You might find something useful.

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Processing in Action
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—I’m Justin Palmer and I approve this message.
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