A lot to do ..

I have started enjoying some of my free time so much that I now make free time to enjoy. Staring with playing badminton, I will get better at this, to learning how to play table tennis. The carom board has been taken over by some people from another project and we could not play because of this. I have started going to the gym as well. But work has to be finished within the time frame and I strive to finish all the important work. This post is all about Rails.

Before Rails I knew what an MVC was and how to implement it. But never got an entire framework bundled with all the features. I am a relative starter in this field but it took little time to understand how great is rails when considered as a rapid application development platform. The tests also was a pro as I never had written a single test when I was doing JAVA [:)].

The usage of helpers like link_to_remote and form_for has been great as it greatly reduced application development time. I also found it better to write all the configurations in a yml and load it via the environment file that to write static classes which returned all these. And the plug-ins that it gave. Just awesome. Think about not writing a single piece of code for the authentication and tagging features. It even has Lucene plug-ins. I have also used the paginating_find plug-in.

The stuff that I hear most from my friends is the problems that ActiveRecord has. As per Abhijat, it took 13 secs to execute a simple query with limit and 3-4 secs without limit. I also understand that loading with include is actually transformed into join statements which is bound to up the query time and object creation time. 1+N problem ! And their effort. I also liked wrting rake tasks as they are so ruby ! :)

I also see that even though twitter is having so much problems extending, a lot of rails sites have come. Slide Share is one of them. I also saw this site called Crazzyegg. They use nginx and mongrel servers. I have not seen a site use mod-rails as of now.

Reactions

The post has a peculiar title because I had a quite heart warming one when I went through the Workstreamer blog. Theres a post titled 'What Does Your Workspace Say About You?' and that just jots down a instance where a desktop uses the Workstreamer client. It feels so much refreshing when something that you have done goes out in the open. The whole stuff was created from scratch and I also had the help of the twitter client snitter (code). The Open APIs where also designed and with the help of my dear friends Abhilash, Rohan and Abhijat.

I also found that Workstreamer had a community in Facebook. There are pictures with me in it too. Extreme right here.

Nice to be part of a great team. KUDOS !!!

Iteration's Over

4 days of mayhem. Sleepless nights and total work. Now I understand what a 'working professional' feels like. Most of the problems where HTML based. We, me and Amit, did all we could, from fixing HTML to Functional and Unit testing. Even after having worked so hard, we got errors during the demo. These errors were quickly sorted out, but pressurized us. But all that is well, ends well (I am a pessimist by the way).

Ruby On Rails coding has been great up until now. Yesterday I had a party along with Vivek, Rohan, Abhilash, Abhijat and Amit, and then Vivek told me the problem he faced when a query fired via find_by_sql took 5 secs to execute. He tells that the query is a simple one with a where clause, no 'in' statements, but fetches 20000 odd records. The same query run via php-myadmin runs in .00x odd secs. Is the Active Record a bad ORM then? I also find many people stating that not using the Active Record in Rails will solve a whole lot of problems.

It was also interesting to find that the ':include' option in 'find' will return you the object to which it has Foreign Key - Primary Key relationship. But it doesnot work if there is a select clause. But why ? If i have a credit table and a user table, then I cant write a find statement, with :include, which gives me the credit amount and the user data? It is a join at the end of the day and the populated stuff, which I understand is bad, could be populated along with the user hash too. This is also the case if I iterate through an array with records which were fetched with along with a select statement. Could not decide if this were logical.

We also put some validations along with the code. Live Validation was introduced to me for the first time and I loved it. I also understand there is a RoR plug-in for this which directly hooks up to the model and then writes its own Javascript code according to the validations given at the model level. Thats just 'WOW' !

I out of ideas as it has been a long time now that I have written something.

But as Arnie says 'I'll Be Back !'

A Brief Breather

This whole month was a busy month. Work was there as usual. I also managed to go to Rajasthan and Kerala for short vacations. And now is the time that I find to write something. A breather after some amount of work to be finished has been done.

Gitesh had his hose warming ceremony two weeks before and thats why we went to Rajasthan. Bikaner to be specific. Man, was it hot there. Atleast 45-46 degree Celsius . We went on a sleeper bus and reached there after 8 hours of journey. The house was great and the ceremonies were very different from what I have seen. We tried giving a minor present, but they refused saying that they don't accept presents from younger people. The rituals lasted for about 4 hours and then the party started. There was music and lots of food. The food was excellent to tell the least. Gulab jamuns and roti curry. Mouth watering stuff. It was great to see those old houses / buildings on both the sides of the market we went. Kids were flying kites over the now bright blue skies. It was also wonderful to see the old fort where all those antiques were stacked for public viewing. I consider myself to be very fortunate that I get to see these places. Thanks Gitesh.

The previous week I took off. Went home and had a great time. The major thing I achieved is that I got to meet a lot of people. Contacted a lot of them. Prasanth, my Uncle's son, with whom I spent a lot of my childhood, was in town from Dubai. I got to spend a ot of time with him. I also went for Joy's wedding on a bike, riding from my place to Chalakudi which is like 40+ kilometers. I also got to meet Ettan and got to apologize for not being able to come for his forth coming wedding on the 22nd.

This time I managed to mature from a mere stubble to a full functional beard. It was a ong time ambition of mine to have a good beard and finally I managed to have one. I also managed to get those transition looks, beard -> spanish mustache -> mustache with raised ends -> clean shave with major whiskers. Pics are attached.