In with the new

As a Christmas present to my big brother I promised him I'd start upon a new website for his business about which he's been pestering me for some time now. I'd put if off for so long largely because I'm the type of person who needs some separation between work and life outside of work - something that's become all the more important to me now that I'm working from home.

That said I agreed to it now because there are some bits of technology that are getting a lot of buzz right now, and it's probably about time I hitched myself to a new bandwagon - the website for my brother is really just a good excuse for me to immerse myself in something new for a bit. Java is all well and good, but it's a big world of tech out there and a bit of polyglottony will do my skill set (and cv) no harm at all. Currently Ruby seems to be the buzzword of the day, along with Rails, the web application framework with which it's closely associated. They've been around for a while now, but their momentum only seems to be increasing and I like what I'm hearing. After spending so many years dealing with languages using C-derived syntax, Ruby comes as something as a shock - What do you mean there's no ternary "for" loop? And where are my variable declarations? Wah! Still, the fact that it's completely object oriented wins big points from me after dealing with Java for so long (primary types - bleh!), and it's handling of collections and iterators is really quite wonderful.

Of course, none of this means anything to my brother, but the beauty of it is that we both get what we want out of it. And isn't that the best sort of Christmas present?