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MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track Blog

Wondering if a Carnegie Mellon degree is right for you? Read about our students' experiences through the MS in Software Engineering, Technical Track program.

Rahul is a full-time MS Software Engineering, Technical Track student. He loves traveling, trekking, swimming and is a complete movie buff.
Anthony is a 2nd year part time student in the MS Software Engineering, Technical track program and works at OSIsoft as a Software Engineer. He loves spending time with his family, hiking, biking, gardening, cooking, and sometimes photography.
Suma is an alumna of the MS Software Engineering, Technical Track program. A Mechanical Engineering undergrad, she loves writing and is passionate about music, shopping and dogs.
Minh is a Software Design Engineer at Microsoft and alumnus of the MS Software Engineering program. He is also a Vietnamese community activist, a cat-lover and passionate fan of film music.
Nick is a Software Engineer at Google and a first-year grad student at Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley. He loves hiking, gaming, and both really extremely good and extremely bad movies.

Thursday, December 6, 2007

Ruby on Rails – where hast thou been all my life?


Time flies when you’re busy, and boy have we been busy with the Construction class. Through all our classes at CMU West, we are supposed to keep track of our hours spent on school, and I noticed that with Construction my average hours spent per week is usually around 25 hours and above, which is significantly more than the usual 10-15 hours I spent on school. However, I attribute this to the fact that I thoroughly enjoy what I do in this class, and that I am a perfectionist trying to make a product that has production-level quality.

What we have done so far is to develop a social-networking based Movie Recommendation website built on top of Ruby on Rails. Fully embracing the SCRUM development process, we have developed a fully-functional website that allows you to register, look up movie information, make movie recommendation, pull up showtimes and theater information and even purchase tickets in four sprints. While we are lagging behind a bit with writing our functional and integration tests, we have practiced the majority of the SCRUM process including stand-up meetings, story points, sprints and backlog items. Fully-embracing the Model-View-Controller paradigm of Rails, we have also developed views for the same functionality for the phone, so you can do all that jazz on your WAP-enabled phone now as well. Now, it’s amazing that our team of only three people was able to pull this off in just four weeks, and we have to thank Ruby on Rails for that.

As a developer who has always had an interest and expertise in web development, I have an appreciation for Ruby on Rails. Its superb database-support via ActiveRecord and superfast development via the MVC model and customizable scaffolding support as well as pretty cool AJAX support make web development such a breeze. In fact, I already “drank the kool-aid” and am already using Ruby on Rails for one of my non-profit websites, and I only wish that I could have done the same for some of the bigger non-profit websites that I have been working on for the past year (and still am).

I find myself learning a lot about Rails, and am almost done with reading our book on Rails cover-to-cover (even though that’s not even required). It turns out that the hardest part about learning Rails was the complicated setup and knowing all the conventions. As a person who is used to simple one-stop-installations in Windows, I found the installation, configuration and deployment of Rails to be rather complicated: installing Ruby, MySql, Java, NetBeans, Mongrel, FastCGI, environment.rb, so it helps that our adjunct professor is a Rails enthusiast and a real Vice President of Engineering at this company that is sold on Rails. Once our team had the basic Hello World going, adding new functionality was a breeze, provided that we know all the Rails convention, so now we are speedily cranking up new features like there’s no tomorrow.

posted by Minh Nguyen @ 3:06 PM 

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