Ok, change of plans everybody. For those of you who read my last post (I think I’ll go for a walk outside now), you may remember I had a list of items I wanted to accomplish, and that I had decided they were pretty much going to have to wait for the fluffy white of Michigan to appear before I could fit them in.
Change of plans.
I recently accepted a position with the University of Notre Dame’s Web Group. I start Monday. They use Ruby on Rails. I’m a PHP programmer. You see where I’m going with this, right? So I’ve spent that past couple of weeks reading and going through RoR tutorials. It feels like the good ‘ol college days when you slack off for the entire semester and then try and cram just before finals. Well, I imagine that’s what it would feel like. I would never have done that myself. No sir. Much too committed to my college education was I.
Ahem.
But so far so good. As anybody who has studied both PHP and RoR knows, there are a lot of subtle and no so subtle differences. The absence of certain structures (curly braces, semi-colons, etc) are wreaking havoc on how I read the code. After so many years of reading and writing code in a specific way, it can be rather jarring when items you’ve trained yourself to watch for are no longer there.
No worries though. Like anything else, all these differences can be learned over time. In the middle of my glorious, supposed to be living it up in slacker-ville, summer. Ah well. I’ll see all of you Rails folks on the help boards. I’ll be the guy with no tan and word “NEWBIE” tattooed to his forehead. Your help will be greatly appreciated.