Alright, my wife has been trying to convince me that I should share the one-off I wrote for our internal lab management, so today I finally got around to fixing the last *major* bug in the system, and putting it up on github.

Yep, that’s right, you too can have a quasi-specialized lab management Ruby on Rails application to manage all the machines in your lab!

What I do hope that this does is inspire me to become a better Rails developer. I’ve been using Ruby for over a year now, I an extremely confident in my Ruby skills, and I’ve made many things I consider useful for myself and maybe for other people. Labview was my first real Rails project, and by first “real” project, I mean first one that I use every day, other people in my office use, and I feel halfway confident releasing it for people to see.

On the other hand, the testing is lacking, documentation is poor and some of the authentication systems are kind of hacked together. I’m labeling this one a “learning experience” and moving on. I probably won’t commit any more to Labview (but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be open if someone wanted to fork it on Github…) simply because right now it works well enough.

Oh yea, and I can’t thank my wife Delilah enough for the better visual design. You should have seen Labview back when it was hacked together in PHP. It was a pastelle assault on the eyes.

Anywho, Labview is a really simple project, and a great start for someone interested in getting into Rails. I’ve learned a lot from developing it, and a lot of the knowledge has immediately been applied in some other projects I’m working on. Perhaps the next Rails app I work on will conform for test-driven-development? I’m looking forward to other projects I have ideas for in the future

I’m also excited about taking a look at Sinatra, since Atmos did a talk on it last night at the Ruby meetup. Specifically, I’m interested to see if I can build a ssh-tunneling server using only Sinatra and Ruby over HTTP…