03 Jun 2008
I am back from
RailsConf 2008 and two of my favorite talks were "
Microapps for Fun and Profit" by
Erik Kastner and "
23 Hacks" by
Nathaniel Talbott. I have recently been toying around with creating small little apps where I can try out new ideas and sharpen my skills.
One of those apps is the
Template Generator Pro. It was a really simple little app the generates funny
cover letters,
two week notices,
job postings, and more. Not a lot to it. What did I learn? I deployed it to
SliceHost (my previous apps have been deployed to
DreamHost) and starting learning more about hosting and system administration. I also had a chance to port the
Nonsense Perl script to
a Ruby version. That was fun!
Tools of the Trade
What am I using for my microapps? The first ones (
CathechizeMe and
TemplateGeneratorPro) were small Rails applications. But that is alot of overhead and not a lot of "micro" in that. So for new things I am looking at
Sinatra for a framework and
Stone or
ActiveRecord with
SQLite for persistance. I like
JQuery for the Javascript and
BluePrint CSS helps me make it look pretty fairly easily.
Open Source Web Design and
Open Web Design help to stimulate the creative aspects of the designs.
Check it Out
You can see some my little hacks being stored on my GitHub account:
http://www.github.com/gdagley. I also have some projects from
work at
http://www.github.com/relevance.
