Wed Jun 20 18
The interesting thing about joining the rails community after a few years in .Net is seeing the vigorous development community.
.Net is a land of giants. Whenever I'm in trouble there's an ultimate source of knowledge I can go to to find out what the problem is. One of the effects of this is that the nuget marketplace is filled with a few sanctified ways of doing things, and then hundreds of thousands of ways that nobody uses. It's very hard to break into..
In rails on the other hand it feels a lot more like there are a thousand perfectly good ways of doing something. I'm reminded of the "Cathedral vs the bazaar" metaphor. When I walk through the dusty marketplace of software mixins in Rails' gems there's no real deciding factor other than "I Like the cut of his Gib" to picking up a gem. There are at least 4 good ways of parsing markdown into HTML built into 4 different gems for example. Whereas in .Net I'd just look for a markdown interpreter somewhere in the System hierarchy.
One of the consequences of this is what I call the configuration blog syndrome. In lieu of finding a centralized resource, I combed through probably 43 different rails configuration blogs in order to get this site up and running. Not to mention picking the brain of a senior rails dev @Bloopletech. While I was doing this I asked myself "Why are there so many configuration blogs" and "Why are there so many ways to configure rails?" Now that I'm here and I've got my software working a certain way for my purpose I finally understand. With no centralised resource to depend on, I'm responsible for my own build wiki. I must create my own documentation. Since it seems to be something of a tradition in the rails community (and because I'll forget how I did it) I'll have to now make my own rails configuration blog.
Happy days!