About
Hi, I'm Greg Willits. So who am I to be giving advice on Rails?
Well, it's more about my ability to translate and re-teach what I have learned than it is about my Rails expertise.
I started working with Rails in earnest in late 2007, but I started developing for the web in 1997, and doing dynamic, data driven sites since 2000, and doing that full time since 2003. My work has primarily been with data-oriented intranet applications for corporate, education, and county government users. During that time I developed my own open source framework in a language called Lasso. I have been pretty active in that community producing tons of code and writing numerous articles.
Since late 2007 my work has seen a shift towards using Rails simply because of the availability of developers for it. Namely, I got started with a project where we decided to have ThoughtWorks do the bulk of the work. I caught wind of "agile" a couple years ago and realized it was very well aligned with how I thought about development, and books like The Pragmatic Programmer filled in the gaps I had, and Fowler's Enterprise Patterns confirmed what I was trying do with my own code.
I am now (Oct 2007) finally getting to spend some time getting my hands dirty in Ruby and with Rails. It's no love fest for me (I really like a lot of what Lasso offers, despite some of its own shortcomings), but I'm getting accustomed to it. There's some cool stuff for sure.
However, software has only been a primary career for me since 2003. I worked for 19 years in the semiconductor manufacturing equipment industry. I started bolting things together, then moved into equipment engineering, sales engineering, marketing, and into marketing management. I did a lot of different things and got involved in every aspect of the business.
I've worked at many levels over the years, and seen behind the curtains. Through it all, I was usually having the most fun when learning something new, then working out the ways to apply and reshape this knowledge to my company's needs and teaching my colleagues why this new stuff was a good thing.
It's this great fun in learning something new, then helping others to understand it too that brings me to finally cave in the blog rage and start this site.
My intent is to catch those things which seem common to the n00b experience with Ruby and with Rails, and document them as completely as I can. Not so much the little details (unless I seen the need), but more the bigger picture stuff where we get told to do X, but maybe not so much why. If I can figure out the why and pass that on, hopefully, I produce some nuggets the community will find useful.
In doing this, I risk sometimes thinking I understand something, when maybe I'm missing important pieces. So, I encourage open discussion and public floggings when needed. I don't need to be right, I just need to help pass along the info that is right.
I look forward to writing, but also to discussing your comments.