I worked at Trinovus in Lubbock, Texas (headquarters in Alabama) from June 2012 to July 2013.

I came in being a relative newbie to Ruby on Rails. I had heard about it in my college days but was still pretty into php cause it was easy. After working at Trinovus for a few months I realized very quickly that why Rails is not easy and actually rather hard, the reward was worth it. While I cannot talk about what exactly I worked on there in regards to personal finance and banking web administration, I can talk about what I used to implement said things. Being a PHP Wordpress guy, rails was a blazing fire of power in the face of the wet-noodle that is wordpress theme development. Rails gives you incredible control if you’re willing to learn the insides. This coupled with several good apis and easily readable ruby source is a potent combination.

As I learned more about rails over my year at Trinovus, I already had this web application in my mind’s eye (as well as all the fun stuff that goes on behind the scenes). Rails’ main pitfall compared to PHP is sadly development time. As deploying a rails app is much more difficult than deploying a php website, it requires significant investment; especially if desired to be done as correctly as possible. That said, if you write it DRY (dont repeat yourself) and write it well, the result is something far better than you could get with a PHP framework. More about this in the thelocus.net and new locus portfolio entry…

• Understanding of Rails Stack
• Upgrading a .net web-based application to an Rails html driven one
• Understanding of the uses of reading open source Rails Gems to deliver more powerful and tailored solutions
• Heavy use of AJAX with Rails