Unquiet

Lately, I tested various Python web application frameworks to make it easier for me to put together web sites — both my own and for other people. Unfortunately, most of the ones I could find either ran their own web server (usually a no-no at most shared web hosts) or required so much CGI fiddling to get started that I lost interest before I could make any headway.

And everybody’s talking about [Rails][] these days. So… I finally decided to spend some time learning enough Ruby (a programming language) to understand the basics of using Rails. And then I spent a couple hours messing with a tutorial.

[rails]: http://www.rubyonrails.com/

Within two hours last night, I had a functioning version of my address book application running on my computer. _And most of those two hours were spent on figuring out how to get the name out of the database_. Once I figured that out, getting addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, sites and tags got progressively quicker.

And the same thing happened this morning - I wanted to be able to tag people from their user page but wasn’t sure exactly how to deal with the database structure underneath. _Turns out, I didn’t have to._

Every time my work took extra time, it’s because I was expecting a level of complexity that wasn’t there. __Wow__. It’s not often that one of the tools I use humbles me, but finally I’ve found something that allows me to write code as fast as I think.