40. (with egg)

It is day 2 at my new gig doing agile/XP and Ruby on Rails; my head hurts. I’m trying to wrap my head around the Ruby language, Rails framework, Ajax paradigms, JavaScript, CSS… namely all the stuff I don’t know well.

I had an interesting conversation with several other developers today. We used to all brag about how we had stayed away from “regular” web development for our entire careers. All of us had developed many apps with a Web front end, but for the most part the heavy HTML, CSS, and JavaScript coding was done by people who specialized in that stuff but didn’t know anything about developing applications. We, oh the special “we”, did the real application development, the server side stuff.

But now that’s changing. Lots of back-end, server-side developers are making the move towards Ajax-based application development because it seems to have real promise. It’s unknown just how far you can push it, but now app-only developers are doing full end-to-end development, and we’re hurting. Guess what? This HTML/CSS/JavaScript stuff is hard! And for those of us that are, well, lacking in the graphical design skills, our pages look bad. Thank god for UI consultant.

Right now I’m paring on some rough drag-and-drop-and-resorting problems. I’m in the “point and question” stage of paring, which is always a balancing act: how much do you slow the Driver down to ask questions versus how much to you hope you’ll just start understanding later? It’ll get better as time goes on of course. I should probably start driving so I can get a feel for the syntax, structure, etc.

Twice, when I’ve started a new job, I’ve been put to work on the hardest problem on the entire application. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but came to realize this later. I’m hoping that it’s happening again.