From: Jayson Williams <williams.jayson@...>
Date: 2008-06-16T22:23:13+09:00
Subject: Re: What was YOUR first Ruby Project

On Sat, Jun 14, 2008 at 7:45 AM, Eric Hegwer <ehegwer@mac.com> wrote:
> I though it be cool to hear what your first experience with Ruby was.
> Was it a job, or just a fun (cough, cough)  side project that you
> decided to take on?
>
> For me, Ruby is my entrance to the world of programming.  My first and
> only computer class was as a HS sophomore in 1986.
>
> And as for my first project, I'm fighting my way through a fourm
> tutorial written for 1.6 (I'm riding 2.02).

My first Ruby project was at work. I was given the responsibility of
manually searching for error messages that were scattered through a
these huge 30M XML documents. The only method in use at the time was
to open the XML document in word, and try to eyeball where the errors
were. It was a ridiculous way to search for errors, that took hours,
and was never better than 50% accurate. A horrible way to blow a
Monday morning. I had gone through the online Ruby tutorial on
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ and was blown away. Hmm... Could ruby be
a better solution. After a few weeks of tinkering, I was able to put
together a script that reduced hours of drudgery to almost instant
results, and from less than 50% accuracy to 100% accuracy.
Waaahoooaaaa. I later bundled the script into an .exe with
rubyscript2exe, and passed the responsibility for finding the errors
to the people I was reporting to. They loved the application, and the
fact that they could get results almost instantly. I have been a fan
ever since. I have even been able to have the company agree to add
Ruby to their authorized development languages. Very nice! I am now 1
of 1 Ruby developers for the company.

~Jay