Comments on: Assrockets and Opportunities (or: Why I Changed Jobs)

By: The Splendiferous Barfing Cup — The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 22:33:59 +0000

[...] dozens of times. It’s like the “Bottle Rocket Up the Butt” video from my article Assrockets and Opportunities: after all this time, it’s still [...]

By: 2008: Annus Assrocketis (The Year of Assrockets) — The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century : Joey deVilla's Personal Blog

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 22:20:06 +0000

[...] little bit over a year ago, I wrote an article titled Assrockets and Opportunities explaining why I was leaving my job as Tucows’ Technical Evangelist, a relatively safe, secure [...]

By: Global Nerdy | Books I’m Buying / Recommended Ruby and Rails Books

Global Nerdy | Books I’m Buying / Recommended Ruby and Rails Books — Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:01:48 +0000

[...] I’ve been quite impressed by the “Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby” series of books (I’ve got The Ruby Way and RailsSpace) as well as the work of series editor Obie Fernandez, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at RailsConf 2006. That — along with glowing reviews for both books plus my serious immersion into Ruby and Rails at TSOT — is why I’ve got Design Patterns in Ruby and The Rails Way on order. I’m looking forward to getting my paws on these books, and I’ll post reviews shortly afterwards. (I’m normally pretty conservative when it comes to spending on computer programming books for the past little while, but that’s because evangelism rather than programming has paid the rent. That situation has changed somewhat.) [...]

By: Global Nerdy » Blog Archive » Take the New Ruby for a Spin

Global Nerdy » Blog Archive » Take the New Ruby for a Spin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:31:55 +0000

[...] It’s assrockets all over again. What is it with people and sticking objects up their [...]

By: Joey deVilla

Joey deVilla — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:17:43 +0000

@SP: You're absolutely correct. That's where the Tucows experience paid off; Ruby (but not Rails) was used in a number of projects, the biggest and most ambitious of which was Blogware, the hosted blogging system. Its developers, Tom and Joe McDonald (friends of ours at VPOP) fell in love with Ruby and convinced me to give it a second look. I use "Ruby sans Rails" regularly as a replacement for shell scripting to do all sorts of sysadmin-y tasks as well as for prototyping apps (which, alas, got turned into PHP apps in the end). I saw the TSOT job as an opportunity to immerse myself more deeply in both Ruby and Rails.

By: SP

SP — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:49:11 +0000

@mp: the second set of links you gave seem to be just RDocs with a little Javascript. Just start up a local gem_server for that. Faster and better for on the road development anyway.

@Joey: if you want more serious background on Rails, make sure you really get into Ruby, not just the Rails APIs. The *WORST* “Rails” developers I have worked with only learned the APIs (and trust me there are a LOT of them out there – I’ve been doing janitorial clean up on Rails applications recently and it isn’t pretty). The *BEST* Ruby/Rails developers understood Ruby inside out, not just the APIs, but the mindset. Good luck!

By: Arugula

Arugula — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 06:08:34 +0000

You said:

> whenever the chef of the restaurant he’s trying to save appears to have lost the passion for cooking, he almost always says “I need to put a rocket up his ass”.

—

I only recall this once, and he was referring to the *arugula* they were cooking with, which is called *rocket* in Britain. He didn’t say *a* rocket, but rather referred to shoving the arugula up the ass of someone who annoyed him.

This seems to be a misunderstanding due to regional linguistic differences.

By: Joey deVilla

Joey deVilla — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:46:06 +0000

@Robin: I was there from September 1987 to December 1994 with a brief hiatus from January 1991 – September 1991. I drew triangle-eyed comics for Golden Words and the windows in Clark Hall Pub, where I was also a DJ.

By: Mick T

Mick T — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:45:35 +0000

I know the feeling. Working for large stable companies, even when you have a lot of flexibility and work with new tech, can be stagnating.

Best of luck!

By: Robin

Robin — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 05:19:15 +0000

I also was at the Crazy Go Nuts University in 1993. Started in CS in ’95. Where you still there?

By: Joey deVilla

Joey deVilla — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:54:57 +0000

@Charles Follymacher: Glad you saw this article ! I’ve got to thank you for your perspective on the bottle rocket video, as it helped crystallize my thinking on what I should do next.

By: Charles Follymacher

Charles Follymacher — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 21:15:09 +0000

Best of luck, Joey. It's a brave move and as a person with some familiarity with the frat scene, I'd say there a great deal of opportunity in this app. You have balls and a supportive wife, so might as well go for it. It's good you got out when you did, well before lethargy set in. Lighting a fire under one's ass is a verry common method for stirring new growth. My post was written out of some part stupefication and some part admiration. The proportions vary from minute to minute, day to day.

By: Mike

Mike — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:18:52 +0000

Great analogy, good luck with the job. I have never had that safe job. From the other side of the fence, I don’t think you will get tired of the startup excitement too quickly.

Remember the opposite of happiness is boredom, not sadness.

By: mp

mp — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 06:10:59 +0000

Oh thanks… that killed me. About rails, here is what helped fast track me.

Watch these:
http://railscasts.com/
http://peepcode.com/

Bookmark these:
http://www.railsbrain.com/
http://www.rubybrain.com/

and connect with #rubyonrails when you are stuck. Good luck.