I’ve recently had the opportunity of changing departments at my company from the Information System Services (ISS) team as a Software Engineer, to the Marketing team as a Web Designer. I’m extremely happy with this move because it allows me to continue doing all that I was doing before, but with much more freedom for creativity and much more ownership in my projects.
The first project I was involved in since the move was 2 new websites for Weatherby Locums. One site being their main site for prospective locum tenens physicians and the other is more of a resource site for existing clientele. Because of my new position, I was the lead designer and the sole programmer for both sites. I programmed the back-end using Ruby on Rails which I am completely infatuated with. In fact, you may have noticed the decline in activity on this blog recently for which I can only give one explaination: Ruby on Rails is so easy, so well documented, and has so many real world examples out there that I haven’t had to resolve a single issue on my own that would warrent a post on this blog (which I am already considering re-programming in Rails instead of PHP).
I highly recommend Rails to anyone out there, whether you are just beginning in web programming or are a novice. Their claim is true, it really is “Web development that doesn’t hurt.”