For my frequent readers, you may assume that I have run crazy … now Ruby on Rails with all the PHP experience that you have got! Well I am shocked as well, but its a necessary step in my growth as all of us have to move out of our comfort zones at some time. Well I am going to be moving to an organization that uses Ruby on Rails as their language tool of choice as a project manager. So yes I have to learn a new tool, leveraging my experience to manage agile projects, so the geek in me has to understand the tool chain to enable me have better dialogue with the business analysts and developers.

So I am starting out on a new path, but as I was taught (brainwashed actually) the best way to learn a new tool is to use it. So I am trying to build a not so super secret software solution to solve a business problem I keep running into as a way of getting into the guts of this tool.

Ruby on Rails (ROR) is tough to get running on Windows as it was more a *nix development tool chain but I am taking up the challenge to get it to work with lots of Google searches and the ever present StackOverflow (now its my chance to ask questions). The environment is as follows:

1. IDE - started with RubyMine for Jetbrains (http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/) with a 30 day evaluation, then I will see what happens next
2. Rails Installer by Engine Yard (http://railsinstaller.org/) - the smoothest way to get Rails up and running. The strange thing is that I am using Ruby 1.8.7 as that’s the version being used by an opensource project I would like to contribute to … so well why not stay behind and do some good while I am at it
3. Ruby on Rails Tutorial (http://ruby.railstutorial.org) by Micheal Hartl free online resouce
4. Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com) - Q&A site most of the issues that I face have already been solved
5. Git - needed a private repo so ended up at BitBucket (http://bitbucket.org) by Altassian. Having little knowledge of Git too, and having a lot of problems setting it up I downloaded SourceTree (http://www.sourcetreeapp.com)
6. Ruby Gems - pre-built functionality
   • Annotate (https://github.com/ctran/annotate_models) - to add documentation of the database structure inside a Model class (helps to know what is being done)
   • Twitter-Bootstrap-Rails (https://github.com/seyhunak/twitter-bootstrap-rails) - integrate twitter bootstrap layout and functionality of which I am a great fan
   • Devise (https://github.com/plataformatec/devise) - prebuilt user signup, authentication, and authorization … now this is an A+ which is not readily available where I am from
   • Simple Form (https://github.com/plataformatec/simple_form) - simple DSL language gem to generate forms, even Twitter Bootstrap formatted ones …

Now in the process of moving the dev environment to a Mac … However after trying to install the different pieces alone, I was advised to use Home Brew (http://mxcl.github.io/homebrew/) following the instructions at http://bit.ly/114X2x1

Part II coming up soon ….