Advantages of taking the path least likely..
This weekend I worked on a service concept I brainstormed with a client, hoping to spring it on them next week. Since its a prototype I decided to put tools to work I have been playing with, namely Sinatra and Redis.
Late last night during a coding session, I was struck by how refreshing it felt to NOT be constrained by the Rails framework.
Being a conceptual developer, I tend to bypass some steps during the initial creation of new applications. Experience has taught me it can be burdensome to try to write tests or specs for things I didn't even know would work.
After all, a painter doesn't test for color accuracy while mixing the paints, that happens when it is forged into a commercial product by the printers, right?
Anyway, last night I didn't have any generators, templates or scaffolds to jump start the project, and building without ActiveRecord and SQL on the back-end I had to craft my own models to interact with Redis.
This made me truly appreciate writing specs early and often, probably a couple hours too late, but still I did appreciate and find joy in it.
