First Post

So, here I am. A fully fledged Software Developer. Allegedly.

I have just deployed my first Rails App this morning. An application to store electronic notes about a project in DNA sequencing, and also find out about the life of that project.

It's been a very interesting ride. First learning OO programming in PERL, then learning Ruby and RoRails,
then breaking out of RoR's generic framework to connect to legacy databases (one Oracle, one a collection of many MySQL databases), then adding LDAP authentication and a mailer.

The most interesting part (apart from learning RoR in the first place) though was probably the smallest. I had to connect a small Tk Application written in PERL to this to send information from a form to store in it and send email and a response of success/failure. This essentially brought me back full circle to learning to use PERL with LWP and XML.

A thoroughly enjoyable ride on the Train. And this, all whilst I was a DNA sequencer.

So as I said at the start, now I am a full fledged software developer. It says so on my shiny new contract.
I'm back doing OO Perl (this time without Class::Std) using ClearPress (see cpan.org) which my new boss developed. The nice thing about his framework is that he has made it very Rubyesque in the views (even though he claims no knowledge of Ruby).

And what am I doing it for - New Sequencing Technology - Illumina machines. This is the forefront of modern DNA sequencing, and here I am at the start of it. AAAHHHHH!

As Bob the Builder says': Let's go team!