Good morning, Dave. Everything is running smoothly. And you?

Over the past week, I’ve been taking online courses at Lynda.com to teach myself the basics of Ruby on Rails. I plan on creating a basic API that will store two or three variables for my Coal Button project. Before I dove into the world of server-side programming, I had lunch with Jonathan Berger, an engineering manager at Pivotal Labs, to chat about the project. He outlined what technically needed to be done for basic functionality, and offered his help as well as couch space in the office when I needed it. (Awesome)

So I’ve cracked open Terminal on my MacBook; installed Ruby on Rails and Gems; got the WEBrick server running; and setup a database and demo application. I’ve even started passing parameters with controller and viewer. Next step happens on Friday: learn about migrations and set up a model for the application.