[FR-devel] Intro

[Robert McGovern]

First, thank you to Curt for approving my subscription. He also asked me 
to introduce myself so here goes :)

BTW Apologies for any spelling errors, teaches me to have not installed 
a spelling plugin into mozilla *sigh*

Who am I?

My names Robert McGovern, I live in the UK and have been programming 
(bug fixing :( ) for the last 3 years mainly in C & C++ with a bit of 
Java. I am now the only member of software team as the other two where 
made redundant over the last year. The projects I have worked on have 
been control software for large power feed equipment.

Ruby?

I came across Ruby about 3 months ago now, at the time I had been 
considering learning a scripting language. (I suppose mainly for the 
heck of it) The choice of course was between Perl & Python, after poking 
around and looking at a few tutorials I got put off and it was then that 
I came across a link for Ruby. I grabbed the prag programmers distro and 
quickly dug into the html pickaxe book. Quite simply I quickly feel in 
love with the simplicty of the language and its elaquence (readability). 
Since then I have been using it where I can for "quick" scripts / tools, 
for instance generating html files of my music collection (20000~ 
tracks), mass renaming digital camera pictures from one date format to 
another and so on. Presently at home I am doing an id3 v1 & v2 tag 
parser, which will eventually be part of a playlist generator.

I have now started introducing Ruby into some of the things that I do at 
work & as of mid last week I had begun to work with FXRuby. I just 
finished a small gui app/dialog that appears when something is submitted 
into our source control system (basically CVS + an sql database). 
Originally it had been done in tcl/tk but it had a number of problems, 
one of which breaks the sql database. Essentially I took the chance for 
a learning experience :)

Why am I here?

The reason I wanted to join this list is partly because I wanted to lurk 
and watch what happens. As I said earlier I haven't really done a mass 
collaboration project and I was interested to see what goes on and I 
think there is a good chance to learn here. Also because I am still 
wandering, I haven't really found a tool / ide that I am happy to work 
with (the same is true of mail clients, building one is a task that I 
keep considering). At home I generally use Eclipse and a work I use Vim 
& Source Navigator and they each have there pluses and minuses. From 
what I can see FreeRide looks to promise a lot and where I can I would 
like to help make it the tool I am finally happy with.

What can I bring?

Certainly the ability to test & find bugs, I have a habit of doing it be 
it for games, apps and websites. I admit that I am not the best 
programer in the world but I am willing to do what I can.

Well I think thats enough for now :) I hope I haven't bored you to much.

Any questions?

Rob