back in Rails work

Classes have started again for the spring semester and I’m off my co-op, so I’m back in full-time classes. I do have to pay the bills, though, so I’m working for one of my professors. He called it “undergraduate research,” and it is kinda that because I have to learn a lot of biology/bioinformatics stuff that I didn’t know, but it’s mostly web development. There’s this Perl web interface for interacting with a MySQL database. Now, what’s Rails good for? Why, providing a web interface for interacting with a database! I therefore plan to rewrite the Perl stuff (which is pretty hairy, especially since the original author 1) was learning Perl as he wrote it and 2) the specs were being changed as he wrote it) using Rails. I’m currently only putting in 6 hours per week but I think I want to increase that on a per-weekly basis, when I can. I’m itching to do more Rails coding and the extra money would be nice, too.

As part of this research, on Thursday I had to attend a bioinformatics lecture about the Rat Genome Database. I didn’t understand 99% of it because I don’t know what QTL’s or EST’s are, but then the guy said he built one of the tools he was demoing with Ruby on Rails, which tickled me. He said he did it in about six weeks and the hardest part was getting it deployed, which I can understand.