Prototyping With Rails #

About a year ago I had to step back into my family business due to a death. During that time I was operating the business while trying to figure out a new owner I was looking at trying to stream line a process that had a pain for many years. It was a fairly simple problem to solve and I had used multiple CRMs geared towards our industry, but none of them had this one feature. So what did I do? I decided prototype an application to see solve my frustration. As a business owner…terrible idea, but as a programmer..typical! Normally, I would reach for my normal dotnet stack, but I wanted to try out the new Rails 8. This has been the inspiration for the recent Rails posts, and now I want to share the project.

My Experience Building A Rails App As A Dotnet Developer #

I use to write a lot of rails applications when I was newer as a developer. Fast forward almost a decade later with professional experience, I thought I would look into rails again. I’ve slightly followed the progression of rails over the years and agree with some points of DDH’s. Main about JavaScript and how it’s become overly complex for web apps. Although, I personally love static type languages. I know shocker - coming from a dotnet developer.

Connecting your Rails application to a database #

Rails default setup uses sqlite which is a great way to get starting building applications, but at some point we will need to connect to a real database. Whether you need functionality that is specific to a certain database, or you want to simulate your production environment more. Connecting to a database is pretty easy with Rails. The first thing you will need is a database installed on your computer. For my apps I primarily use Postgres and pgAdmin as my GUI.

Rails development on Windows #

Developing Rails applications on windows has always been a pain. It’s simple enough to install ruby and the need gems to get a basic Rails application started, but in time developers will run into problems. A lot of gem work fine in a windows environment, but some do not compile down correctly and this is the main issue with developing on Windows. For this reason many people who need to work on Rails applications are running their development environment on OSX or Linux, including me. With Windows WSL I decided to see if I can get a working, acceptable development environment on a Windows computer. After some trial and error (plus some help from google) it’s pretty good.

Hello, World! #

My name is Andrew Rady and I am currently a front end developer at Ritter Insurance Marketing working with Vue. I have been writing some blog post on our company blog at rimdev.io, but I wanted to start a personal one. On rimdev.io most of my articles are around vue since that is what I work on mostly, but I want to be able to share some of my experiences from side projects. I am person who doesn’t write a lot so a personal goal of 2019 is to get better, and the best way to improve on something is to do it.