Bhabishya Kumar

I can't believe we have been together for one whole year! It was this very month last year that I started this blog. It was supposed to be a medium to share my experiences during my journey in Ruby on Rails & JavaScript hacking.

Of Course, I hadn't met you yet!

All I wanted to do was create a super-simple website using Rails & JavaScript. But I couldn't do that after meeting you. You were always there luring me with things which were much easier & fun then starting a project from scratch. You gave me the instant gratification which is so tempting. I was always looking for excuses to meet you even though it made me feel guilty afterwards. Whenever I faced some obstacle, you took me in your loving embrace and made me forget everything.

To be honest, I haven't been totally loyal to you this whole time. I have been sneaking out to meet other people like Gadgets & GreaseMonkey scripts. They make me feel good about myself. I don't feel miserable afterwards as I do after spending time with you. But those occasional dates never materialized into anything meaningful like a full website. Its about time that I change that. Its going to take a lot of commitment, effort from my side but I have to bite the bullet.

I am so sorry to say this but I think we should break-up.

I was initially trying to host this blog at Slicehost which offers bare bone Ubuntu VPS with no pre-installed software. Going by Geoffrey Grosenbach's article, I thought it might be a good time to finally learn Unix. But it was not to be...

The worst qualities of other VPS Hosting Providers mentioned in that article holds true for Slicehost too, i.e. "requires knowledge of Unix sysadmin". I guess its not much of a problem for someone used to development on UNIX, but for a guy like me who never had to work on UNIX in entire software development experience, it was a nightmare.

Things didn't go as smoothly as mentioned in their wiki. At every step, something failed and I had to provide some kind of hack to make it pass. Even the windows hack didn't help.

Without Windows Explorer, Mouse, Ctrl C, Ctrl V., I feel totally handicapped on UNIX and my productivity goes down drastically. The infinite vi, ESC+INSERT, ESC+wq! killed me. Even the basic operations like scrolling up the ssh console to see the top of error stack trace or copying a block of code from a web page to a file were beyond me.

So, I realized that I was not actually learning anything. Even if I had made it work somehow, something would have broken on future deployments. I decided that I should concentrate more on Rails coding rather than deployment.

Then I came across WebFaction Rails Hosting and their Control Panel Demo. I used their Custom Install Script for Mephisto and got this blog up & running in 10 minutes.

So what about UNIX hacking? Maybe in the next life!