I’m taking a week off of active programming to focus on better understanding 3 aspects of Rails development I’ve been wistfully ignoring: Migrations, Testing, and Deployment.
There’s a tiny, fun little project I’m using as the venue for these subjects.
One week from today (May 1) is what I’m giving myself on this effort. Any longer and it’ll be a distraction rather than a learning exercise.
I’ve always have a conceptual issue with Migrations. While migrations make it super easy to iteratively change the database, I’m accustomed to having the database a rock solid representation of, well, the database. My inclination is to look in and modify the database directly, then within create_[model].rb, then within schema.rb. Having bits of the model strewn about numerous migration files feels messy.
I’ll get used to it. Probably even savor it once I wrap my head around it.
Once you’ve learnt migrations you’ll never go back! Think of your database as evolving along with your application code. With migrations it makes it so simple to make changes (even simply adding an index to a column for a performance boost) you won’t even need to think twice about doing it.
Again with deployment, using Capistrano, that first time you do a “rake remote:deploy_with_migrations” you’ll be hooked!