I’d like to think that learning Ruby on Rails has benefited my research. I’m certain that ActiveRecord has made it much, much easier to bridge the gap between my code and my database. I think validations make it easier for me to weed out bad data points in large data sets. I know for sure that RSpec has made it easy for me to test for every bug that I can think of in my code.
My nagging worry is that Rails was primarily designed for building web applications with a ‘nice’ sized dataset in the database. I can’t really say what a nice size dataset is, but I can guess that it is not 14 million rows. The difference in what Rails was designed for, and me using it for bioinformatics is highlighted when I need search for information about creating a certain type of spec, versus information about processing an ActiveRecord model over a cluster. I think that data processing, such statistics, analysis, and plotting, is where the gap lies between using Rails for its original purpose in building web applications, and subverting it to create a framework for a data centric project.