The Enspired Blog

As much as I enjoyed my years developing in Visual Basic and then in C# and ASP.NET, it’s hard to even remember what made it fun. At least, looking at it from the language perspective. The projects were often fun, and I love the creative nature of writing code in general. But the languages were not elegant and the code produced just wasn’t beautiful in the way that I expect code to be these days.

I keep getting emails about .NET positions day after day. After spending over two years working in Rails, and working exclusively in Rails for the last year… how could I go back to .NET? Even if Rails work was impossible to find, I can’t imagine leaving the world of dynamic languages and MVC frameworks.

After yet another job shake up, I’ve found myself in the position of having to really consider the stability of a .NET position. There are lots of them out there, but what is stability without joy in what you’re doing day in and day out? So rather than throwing in the towel, I’m just going to try and take my destiny into my own hands. I’ve launched Rent-A-Railer and I’ve started marketing my independent services. As the name indicates, I’m staying on the Rails. I’m a hired gun, I’m an expert consultant, I’m a moonlighter, I’m and one-man wrecking crew… whatever services you need, I’m your guy! And if it’s more than I can handle, we’ll call in the big guns from Re::Rails.

So if you’re looking for complete end-to-end development services, or you just need someone to step in and get your project launched, get in touch and let me help you succeed. Available for hire… Rent-A-Railer is just a call away.

I’m excited to announce that a new consulting company has formed out of the team that created Lypp. The goal of Re::Rails is to bring this same level of Rails expertise, and proven success to your projects.

Web Application Triage.

Your deRailed projects need not be abandoned. Our team has the skill and experience required in order to properly assess, scope and deploy your Rails project in rapid fashion.

Ruby on Rails Design and Development.

ReRails specializes in the complete design, development and deployment of commercial Ruby on Rails projects. We handle the entire process from concept to production.

Visit Re::Rails online to find out more.

There’s a great write-up on acts_as_conference, which is fast approaching in February. Check out the interview with Rob, which highlights our objectives and also scoops some of the latest announcements about the conference including an exciting give-away for those who attend the charity session.

The buzz is going to continue to build and we hope to see the remaining 100 seats go quickly in the next couple of weeks. The acts_as_conference event has something for every web developer who wants to elevate their skills, experience and expand their professional network. If you are already doing Rails or even if you’ve just dabbled with it, you can go much deeper in this two-day event.

I’ve been working to wind down all of my websites that were hosted with Site5 as my account was nearing its expiration. I have relocated everything to my new home with Slicehost. Site5 was a great hosting company and they lived up to their esteemed reputation for having great customer service. However, I decided that it was time to grow up a little bit in the world of Rails hosting, so I got myself a tiny “slice”. It’s been a great learning experience moving from a managed/shared hosting environment to a VPS hosting solution.

So, the upside to VPS hosting is that I have full control over my server’s configuration. This allows me to create my ideal Rails environment with only the things I need. I’ve decided for most of my applications that Lightspeed, Rails and MySQL are more than adequate. The downside is that I have full control, which leaves me to my own devices.

For this blog I decided on Mephisto since it seems to be the simplest, best supported, Rails-based blogging application available these days. I don’t know if I’ll convert my old wordpress blog content or not. To be honest, there wasn’t much valuable content there to make it worth the effort. I have comments turned off until I can install better spam filtering. I’ve had a lot to do just to get my sites fully functional, so it’s a slow process to get everything back to 100%.