Hack.ala.cio.us

Hackalacious! Heck, what's that ... well, that's just a word I coined a minute back...add hack to delicious and that is what you get :)...used the same name pattern that we used for our Hackday project..we called it Profilicious, a combination of Profiles and Delicious...all credit to Chuck, my manager's manager for coming up with that name...


It is a challenge to come up with something on a hack day and it is a bigger challenge if you have to do it with your manager's manager and even bigger if you are new to the group and the biggest when you hardly know anything about what you are doing, but any challenge is worth taking if it is interesting :)..This one was and had the added opportunity that I could know my superior better, so I just jumped into it..Our plan was to build a tagging engine for Travel users on RoR..Ruby on Rails. I always had intentions of working on Ruby on Rails, but never had the opportunity to...now was my time..the challenge was to learn all this in 4 hours without any knowledge of Smalltalk or any other scripting language and then apply the same towards building our application ..

Well, I will say one thing...me was not a big success building the application..Chuck almost did it single-handedly..I helped in setting some direction, arranging data and some QA and kept Chuck on his tasks and tried learning RoR all the while...a total Role Reversal....he was amazing and almost accomplished what we had set out to do...and all that single-handedly...no mean task for any developer, greatly done by a newbie (he himself was just 10 days into this) and for a person at his level, his skills were just amazing! Anyways, back to RoR...it's an amazing piece of work...am learning more by the day and am surprised at it's compact, explosive power...creates tables on the fly, inserts into n tables with just 1 line of code..can write a full-fledged application in just 21 lines...Man, it is just wonderful...very difficult to describe...only drawback, you have to adhere to some strict naming conventions to make all this happens but well it is an interesting way to program and really asks for a perfectionist to perform!!

Ruby has been red-hot right right since it's inception (somewhere in Japan I believe) and it just seems to be getting better by the day...Rails is even making it nearer to the developer community with it's in-built MVC architecture and ORM (ActiveMapper, I think that is what it is called) and if it is integrated into the JDK, no beating it! Me, am totally impressed with it and will build an app just for the he(a)ck of it ...if you have been thinking about using it but haven't gathered enough energy and enthusiasm to pick it up like I did earlier, just shake yourself..YOU ARE MISSING OUT ON SOMETHING !!!!!