Monday Questions is a recurring series on Approaching Normal. For more questions like this, please visit the archives.
This is a follow up to last week’s question How do you decide what technologies to explore? Today I want to know What technologies are you exploring?
I’ll go first. Aside from Ruby and Rails, Erlang and CouchDB are the things that I’m currently spending time looking into.
Post your answers in the comments below.
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Approaching Normal is the personal site of Larry Wright, a 30-something technologist. I live in the town of Normal, Illinois with my wife and three children.
I have diverse interests, including Ruby on Rails, Agile development methodologies, design, and entrepeneurship. You'll find a little bit of everything here, but mostly technology and business stuff.
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Right now…at this very moment, I’m exploring hardware. I’m building my new quad core machine. This is a huge upgrade from my current home PC which was built 6 years ago. As I’m building this I’m learning all the new connectors and protocols that go along with the hardware. After that, I’d like to pick up and learn how to create/implement virtual machines on this new machine so that exploring rails and other language doesn’t “gunk” up my machine.
Tim,
Virtual machines are extremely handy. If you’re building a Windows box, be sure to check out vmWare player, it’s free and it lets you download and try out a bunch of different types of OSs. It doesn’t let you create your own images though.
I seem to like to explore things in completely separate areas, and try to make them work together. These days I’m mostly coding in Rails apps in Ruby, so alot of the technology centers around those.
On the web side I’m exploring the Jester and Lowpro JS libraries.
For Rails templates its SASS and HAML for cleaning up CSS and HTML templates respectively.
In my Rails specs I’m looking at replacing fixtures with the Scenario plugin.
Like alot of people I’m looking at Git, and using git-svn on projects where Subversion is being used still.
For deployment I’m looking at Vlad the Deployer instead of Capistrano 2.
I’m also looking at the Varnish HTTP cache to work in-front/instead of Nginx.
Finally I’m looking at Xen and EC2.. rolling my own Gentoo Xen image, and then converting it into an AMI for use on EC2.