Rudi on Rails

It has been a while since my last post. I did not really get the chance to put all the things up that I intended to, yet. Mainly, this is due to work keeping me really busy these days. Also, there has been some development that will make a significant change to my life over the next few months…

So what happened then?

Well, I deployed my very first commercial Rails application to the public. It is actually the second Rails application I work on for my company, but it was finished earlier. So, there’s a point to argue about ;-) I will make a separate post about it as soon as I get some more time.

Other than this I visited London… twice: The first time in July to see Michael and Emily and again in August to see Steffi, Marko, Christian and Jens from back home in Germany. Both times I went to see friends and to have some quality time with them. As we had good fun and great weather, I really enjoyed both visits and it was a welcome distraction from the every day life. Christian had his camera with him, so he made some nice shot of us and the city. I think it’s best if you see for yourself…

From day two onwards we actually started to do some walking around the city. We went to see the buildings in Bank, relaxed a little in Hyde Park to enjoy the sun some more, and we ended up in Camden Town, of course.

Yes we had a good time. It was great to see my friends after I haven’t for quite a long while. Last time we met was around Easter – and then just for the weekend. Catching up altogether was long overdue. So we met, we laughed and we promised to repeat it again some time :-)

Location, location, location

Now you might ask yourself, or maybe not, why I appear so fancy in some of the early pictures. That was because I decided to try my luck in London after my first visit in July. So, as the second visit in August came closer and closer I sent out my references and, lo and behold, I got myself a new job! I was lucky to get the interview arranged for the same time I was in London anyway so it would kind of save me to go down there again (three hours of train and accommodation nightmare in the middle of the summer season). While my mates were sipping pints I was having the job interview.

I am really exited about this at the moment as this will make a big change to my life for the next few month. It is kind of starting fresh again – meeting exiting people and building new friendships. I look very much forward to this challenge – from a professional point of view also. The company is exactly doing what I was looking for (best prerequisites to start if you ask me). So, I am currently looking for a place to stay which is not easy considering the very competitive market in London. My teutonic heart tells me to get everything sorted well in advance, but down there it’ll be fine to sort out something just a couple of days before I actually move in somewhere. Well, looks like I still have some weeks left before I start in October ;-)

Wish me luck!

Lo and behold everyone! I finally made it. Having that domain name for about a year already, I never got around to finish the web site I originally started – until now! In short: It’s a celebration, bitches!

Triple W

Who am I? Hi, my name is Rudi. I work as web developer and general dogsbody in a nice little web design company in Middlesbrough, United Kingdom. Originally coming all the way from Germany I don’t really remember how I ended up here – perhaps I will when writing the about section. That is where you will find much more information about me, what I am currently involved with, and projects I have done in the past. As this site is still fresh and clean (that’s the part where you have to lean back, take a deep breath, and get that new smell), I did not want to overload it with all that stuff, yet. All the empty space will certainly be filled soon.

What’s all this about? This web site is going to be used as general base for everything that I think is worth sharing with the world. You may like it, or you may not – in either case I’d like to hear your thoughts. Mainly though, I plan on using this site to display and extend my portfolio. I have fair bit of online work under my belt already since I started as professional in October 2006, and a couple of really cool applications coming up that are mainly developed with Ruby on Rails. So… stay tuned for more!

Why Rudionrails? For a little longer than a year now, I am using Ruby on Rails – a framework to develop database-driven web applications (Yea thats right: this is the geek part! You normal people out there may skip this paragraph and continue reading further down). All started off when working on my Master’s in 2006. I knew about it before already, but never had an in-depth look at it. I sometimes want to smack myself for not using it before, because it has made me a better developer in many ways. Still, it is not the right post to let my thoughts wander about Rails, I do that enough already at work (wink to my colleagues). So why Rudionrails? Well, Ruby on Rails – Rudi on Rails… get it? And seriously… why not?!

First deed of the day

Actually, I just wanted to share the designs I have made before starting with that site. There were a couple of different layouts and colour schemes, but only two made it to the final run. Kudos to Adobe’s Kuler and the people publishing all those awesome colour schemes there. For design imbeciles like me thats the last resort! The one I am using at the moment is based on the pretty high rated Granny Smith Apple colour set made by Donald Agarrat. Go check it out… you can spend hours browsing through their database. The second finalist is based on an old design I made or this site almost a year ago already. The page layout was very different though. I incorporated it into the layout for this site.

Enough about that! Here they are:

I hope you like them. I actually asked a couple of people before I decided which to use. They all favoured the green one, me included. And, ohh yea, I use mephisto to power my blog. In my opinion, thats an awesome and very scalable CMS for blogging – of course developed in Ruby on Rails.

So, what now? Well, that is pretty much it for today, but I’d love to hear what you think about my site. Happy posting!