Six Pints of Lager and a Ruby

Recently I’ve been looking at building myself a small server on my home network and installing Ruby. I have a very real desire to get my hands dirty with the latest web development technology and where better than in the privacy of your own network? Once I have that little baby up and running, I’ll get Rails in there aswell!

As primarily a server-side developer, I’ve had experience with a number of different web-based languages running on a number of different servers. Currently I’m Object-Orienting-it-up on PHP4 with MySQL but I’d love to get my hands on PHP5 and RoR. I started out using ASP Script and had a dabble with ASP.NET when it first appeared on the scene, but driven by the open-source community, I got more of a kick out of PHP and stuck with it.

I originally got into programming through my interest in computer games and became quite a competant C++, DirectX and OpenGL developer before getting a taste for Web stuff. (What can I say? I like mucking about with Photoshop aswell!) This propelled me into learning Java, since it contains a majority of the concepts in C++ - it’s a shame I stopped playing with both these languages when I started working at Rentokil some 5 years ago, but I’ve only really got myself to blame for that.

The arrival of Ruby and the Rails framework has seriously wet my appetite for a new language once again, and I’m definately going to get off my arse and delve in. However, I’ve just finished reading an incredibally interesting blog post discussing why Ruby on Rails will never become mainstream. It’s a very well written piece and I heartily recommend it to anyone that’s interested in the way languages spread and progress:

Why Ruby on Rails will never become mainstream…

On a different note; sorry I’ve been so quiet recently - I’m about a weekend away from launching a new design and layout for this site and, unfortunately, the blog has suffered!