I’ve been stuck for a while now. There are so many amazing technologies and frameworks out there, and I’ve finally decided to devote some serious time to one of the best (in my opinion) which is Rails. I know I’ve talked about this in the past, and, frankly, I’ve been either too busy or too lazy to seriously devote time to it. But this year I’ve decided to make a resolution to seriously learn Rails by rebuilding this blog with it. I know there are a million blog platforms out there, especially when you consider the fact that every geek seems to write their own. I know I’m going to be re-inventing the wheel here, and I am in no way disappointed with WordPress. But the best way for me to learn is to just dive in head-first and get my hands dirty, so that’s exactly what I’m doing.
In the spirit of truly immersing myself in Rails development, I’ve come to realize that even though it’s 100% possible to write Rails applications on Windows, the experience is less than ideal. I’m sure some of you out there are very successful Rails developers using Windows as your primary OS and more power to you! But this is my journey, and I feel like I really should use the best-of-breed development environment for the task at hand, and Windows just isn’t going to cut it. So… I decided that OSX was the best for me. It seems like the vast majority of the Rails community uses OSX for development, and I don’t mind following in their well-established footsteps!
“But wait!,” I hear you say, “Aren’t you a .NET developer, and don’t you have production websites running on ASP.NET MVC?” Ah, yes, my fair reader, you are correct! But in today’s world of virtualization, especially on an OSX host, there’s no reason you can’t run your entire .NET development environment inside a beefy VM, and my main machine is definitely beefy enough to handle it! See for yourself:
On my main machine, I’m actually running Snow Leopard now. I installed OSX 10.6 from a retail DVD (thanks Apple Store!) and I’m loving every minute of it. My virtual machine is a Windows 7 32-bit install with the “Windows Classic” theme because it honestly looks cleaner to me. VMWare Fusion makes all of this possible, and I couldn’t be happier. My performance is rock solid, so far. And the best part is, now I can work in the best .NET environment through sweet virtualization, and the best Rails environment because let’s face it: TextMate on OSX is sexy as hell:
If there’s interest in a more specific outline of how I got all this set up, I could definitely make a “How To” post or maybe a screencast that details everything.
Hi! My name is Scott. Welcome to my place on the web. I currently work in St. Louis, Missouri as an ASP.NET developer, although I tend to use whatever language tickles my fancy at the moment.