In less than an hour, I quickly added blood pressure:
It was really quick and dirty and it doesn’t have an in-line form, but it’s there and it’s working. I wasn’t able to achieve as much as I could but I think I got pretty far for one weekend. And it’s very clear that by the end, my speed was much greater than at the beginning, just compare the difference in time it took to implement each of the trackers.
I think the bigger time sinks were new stuff that I didn’t know. At the moment I was starting those I knew they were going to waste some time, but I was thinking in long term. Getting Formtastic to work as I wanted took some time, but now I’m able to create forms pretty fast. Starting to use nifty_generators took some time to actually find what they were and the syntax, but now every time I generate code I’m one step closer to finish it than before; and the look of the page is not hideous.
Another waste of time was figuring out how Rails and gems interacted. Some gems I add them and work, others don’t. Previously I included those gems manually in my code, but now I know how it works. During a couple of hours I wanted to make a much more advanced graph that would properly display 4 values or 400 values until I realized that it doesn’t have to be dynamic. When you want to see the last week, you pick last week, when you want to see last month, you pick that (well, a graph like Google’s Finance would be better, but ok, I’m humble). There’s no way to pick bigger range for the graph now, but the code is very ready for it.
I believe the experiment was a success: I can and I am very productive in Rails, same as with ASP.NET MVC or more.
