Today finds me celebrating (in a rather low-key manner) two milestones. The first milestone is finally getting this blog off the ground, and the second is the second anniversary of the first commit of my first serious Rails project. The initial site went live two weeks later, replacing a crufty old PHP-based codebase that I had grown weary of maintaining. Naturally, several new features have been added since the original launch and both Ruby and Rails have made developing the site more enjoyable than any of the languages that had been used previously.
For much of the year the site doesn’t look like anything that anyone would bother using Rails, or any other application framework, to create. Why not just throw up a bunch of static HTML pages?
Well, the site exists to support the Dixie Cup homebrew competition that’s held every year in October. The public side of the site handles the online registration process while an administrative backend handles the running of the competition. For about 10 months of the year the site sits quietly with infrequent updates and then springs to life for a couple of months of serious activity.
Since I’ve had several inquiries about the code from other clubs who want to use it for their own competitions, I’ve begun working to extract the guts into a separate project. I found myself needing to look at the revision history of some files and, at one point, decided to look all the way back to the beginning of the revision history for the entire project and noticed the date of the first commit was March 20, 2007.
