About this site

This site is an experiment running on a custom Ruby based framework-free MVC app using Rack to interface to the webserver and Sequel against an Sqlite database for the models. About 10KB of code total, including the admin interface with some simple Ajax based CMS functionality to give in place editing/saving of page content. Of that about half (a couple of hundred lines of code) is made up of reusable, independent components. I don't like frameworks. Frameworks tend to imply high coupling.

I also actively dislike "magic". Magic is just another words for "shit goes on behind your back". I want to be able to easily rip up the plumbing and see exactly what's going on why. One of the things I love about Sequel, for example, is that until I try to pull data out of a dataset, inspecting it will give me the SQL it will use to query the database. It's visible, yet abstracted away so that I don't have to deal with it normally - and it's powerful enough that I so far have not found a single reason to dip down into raw SQL. It's however incredibly useful to be able to quickly, at any point, see what's going on when you don't quite know why something isn't working.

Using Rack lets me switch webservers at any time (as a result you may find the site at varying times running on Webrick, Mongrel, Thin or others, depending on what I feel like experimenting with), as well as write neat little filters to add capability while keeping coupling minimal. When I added Rack support I threw away hundreds of lines of code, and gained more capabilities. I like throwing away code. The more code you throw away while retaining or increasing functionality, the better what is left is likely to become.

Apart from any photographs, all graphics on my site are generated using Ruby scripts and Cairo - I really don't feel like using a drawing program for that kind of stuff.

I might end up posting snippets over the next few weeks. We'll see.