Sinatra, Github, And More
Filed in Ruby. Delivered Tuesday November 25 2008
Some random things… I’m now six months into my job at Politics4All and it is pretty amazing how far we’ve come as a company and how much my views on open-source and ruby have matured.
Sinatra is an awesome framework. I’ve written hoboken (a simple wiki) with it and now I’m running this blog on it thanks to August Lilleaas’ stuff-site.
There’s something about Rails where once you start using it you want to use it for things that it is overkill for. You can use a chainsaw to cut the Thanksgiving turkey, but are you sure that’s the wisest thing to do? Sinatra stays out of the way and lets you do as little as you want to do. All Sinatra is doing for me is pointing http requests to my methods. There’s no black magic or voodoo going on, it is just a small DSL on top of rack. It does what it does, and lets me do what I want to do. That’s awesome.
GitHub has, for months, only existed for me as the place where my work repository was stored and a place where I could browse other people’s repositories. I’ve dabbled in open source before, but when Calendar About Nothing showed up, something clicked for me. I might not be able to turn out the next big thing, but there’s surely something incremental I can do each day to make my hobby projects and the projects of others better. Sure enough, I’m now thirteen days into a streak. I’ve worked on hoboken and a few api wrappers and made minor improvements to gnip-ruby and the aforementioned stuff-site. You can follow me on github if you’d like.
So, “thank you” to August, the people behind sinatra, github, and Calendar About Nothing.