So I was up til 4am last night with Ruby. I guess I assumed that I’d pick up the language a little easier than I have. Or perhaps I should have just been a little less adventurous and have taken a look at some of the tutorials before jumping into Ruby on Rails head-first.

The first thing I wanted to do with my first project was set up a user authentication system so that I could restrict the creation, modification, and deletion of items to authorized users. Although the Ruby on Rails website has many, many, many different generators that can help people like me get this going quickly, I got completely and utterly confused when doing so. So, after many false starts (during which I tried experimenting with every user authentication generator that the website offered) I took a Counter-Strike break.

After a couple hours of fragging I came back to the project to give it one last go. I settled on just using the simplest generator, Login Generator, and got that working actually quite quickly and easily. I figure I’ll just end up extending this simple user authentication system when I have a better handle on Ruby and Rails. In any case, by 4am when I decided to finally get some sleep, I had gotten the administration area password-protected and had begun playing with adding methods to maintain the various items that my project uses.

So, that’s how my first night with Ruby ended.

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