Well sadly more and more I find myself programming on my Mac over my Windows machine. While I still believe windows is a great platform for programming even in Ruby it’s all come down to one thing. Time. The more projects I work on the more gems I get exposed to and the more errors those gems produce due to not being testing or just no support for windows. While this may be addressable by installing a linux wrapper like cygwin onto the windows system I have not personally gave it a try.
While trying to use the windows machine I am constantly researching error messages that end in one of three ways. I change some config in that gem to fix the issue, rollback gem versions to one that worked on windows, or move over to the mac.
It’s unfortunate however it’s understandable. As I mentioned in another blog post, most ruby/rails app are going to be running on linux servers, so why break your back to support a development environment that will have no implementation in production.
With time being my main driver it’s more important to get things done then fight with a half supported platform. I have been working on my Macbook Air for a good part of the time. The only issue with it, is it stresses to run on my ultrawide display. However, I have found a home lately on Cloud9. It has provided me a nice web ide to program in, while giving me access to a Ubuntu linux terminal to do all my ruby and rails work in. The biggest issue I have with Cloud9 is just with the IDE itself. I use Atom on my computers and love the keyboard shortcuts and little gems it can do speeding up my programming time. The only other issue I have is speed of the VM. it takes a while to run rake test although I have been told if I upgrade to a paid account you get more power.
However, at the end of the day it does what I need. So if you are looking at getting into rails and can’t afford a mac I’d encourage you to check out Cloud9. Your projects are public however, in your learning just about everything you do should be on github so its not really a big deal. Main thing is don’t let yourself get discouraged by all the errors you are getting. Move to a Linux or Mac environment so you can focus on learning, and not troubleshooting.
As always thanks for reading, and follow me on twitter for more daily updates and post on my journey from Senior IT Admin to Junior Developer. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments below, and don’t forget it’s always a good time to start to #LearnToCode