Ruby on Rails

These days I do most of my work with Ruby on Rails. I got my start as an intern at Dallas Semiconductor in the summer of 2006. The prototype test engineers needed a cross platform, and therefore browser based, front end for their machine's testing suite. I was given the task of creating a system that would allow them to execute testing tasks and check in on their status periodically. At the suggestion of my boss we gave Ruby on Rails a try since no out of the box solution could even begin to solve our problem. Neither of us knew Ruby and until then I'd never even heard of Rails. Needless to say it was a pretty daunting task since the Rails community was still fairly small at that point.

It wasn't long before I'd practically fallen in love. I soon realized Ruby was the language I'd been dreaming about for years. And Rails finally allowed me to do something I'd wanted to do for some time: make fully functional web applications and websites with dynamic content contained in a database. I'd never had any real desire to write huge Perl or PHP scripts to do all of the necessary MySQL queries and simply installing an application someone else has written is no fun. Rails let me skip over the boring part of making websites and focus on what truly mattered to me, the part of the site that wasn't guaranteed to be a reinvention of the wheel.

Since that summer as an intern I've made over a dozen Ruby on Rails web applications or websites. This site is one of them. Others can be found at: