ruby

because GOTO is bad.

A recounting of our time spent in struggle with rvm and native Gem builds.

I dove into most every cave of a modern Web Document build chain, and have come back with some pearls to show for it.

When we stop building Ruby from source every time, we also stop auto-installing the binary dependencies.

A rather odd mix of side-projects and Ops-related chaos.

I had to go through this entire process twice – once on my work Macbook Pro, once on my identical home verison – so I figured I’d might as well write all of this crap down in the hope that it may reduce the shock and awe of future migrators.

Specifically, I wanted to tack some Twitter search features onto it, and I was very impressed with how this library has been built.

Ruby provides some nice features for when you’re building hand-rolled health checking tools. And there are some sshd tricks to be played, too.

I spent three weeks (please don’t laugh) worth of my daily commute writing assertions for the core language, the standard packages, plus ActiveRecord and other common gems.

I was sitting at Cafe International and setting up RadRails when the HD on my two-week-old MacBook Pro 2008 went into beachball-of-death mode.