To Ruby on Rails proficiency, that is. I mean, I just happen to be in Madison WI at the moment, getting ready to play a show at the Barrymore Theater. Iā€™ve spent the last two days holed up in a corner of the awesome Fair Trade Coffee House on State St. drinking their awesome dark roast and getting up to speed on some things.

After having written about version control last week, I figured it might be cool for me to actually make a choice and get up to speed on one. My only other freelance programming buddy out there uses Subversion, so of course I decided to go Git. Git has a great site that will store your code for you called GitHub - they kinda go hand in hand. Itā€™s a fun and relatively easy place to start getting familiar with the process of controlling your code. Iā€™ve been working out of a Rails book and am pushing the practice project that Iā€™m working on up to GitHub. The best thing about Git for me has been that it only took me about 2 days worth of hacking and poking around to get it running like itā€™s supposed to be. This is in stark contrast to the week or so I spent trying to get Subversion happening before basically giving up. I understand the concepts behind Gitā€™s system of source control much better than I understand Subversion, as well. And GitHub is a (for now) free place to upload my stuff.

The reason this excites me so is that Iā€™ve embarked on a learning project. I briefly exposed my intentions yesterday on this blog, so if you get this via RSS, you probably already have the idea. For those of you browsing the web version, the idea is basically a simple photo sharing site for wayward musicians. I got the idea from a great piece of dressing room graffiti in Cleveland at the Beachland Ballroom, and the domain just happened to be available although admittedly of questionable taste. Perfect for musicians, I think. So Iā€™ve decided to try and build this thing as a Rails project. That should make it functional, but gritty and cheap looking, just like it should be. Anyway. Have fun out thereā€¦