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Comment by edawerd | Hacker News Reader

Awesome, heartfelt post. It really got me reminiscing about the good ol' times in hot, humid Boston that summer.

Oh man, almost ungodly humid. But I agree, that was a fine piece of writing by Tom.

Well, some of you geniuses decided to not even use A/C, which was completely nuts. Once ours were acquired, things were rather comfortable... so long as you didn't leave the room with 2 units in the windows!

Our "office" (read living room filled with computers) was actually sealed off with sheets in order to keep the cool air from the in-window AC confined to that room.

The real killer was the two mile hike to YC for weekly dinners and meetings. Unfortunately walking to the T, taking it a couple stops, then walking to YC was the same equivalent distance, so we ended up just hoofing it over there in the heat and humidity.

We did pretty much the same. I remember sometimes it would rain like crazy out of nowhere. We'd come to dinner soaked to the teeth! good times, yo

Two serious lessons learned:

1) Don't try to get through a Boston summer without AC

2) Don't try to code 18 hours a day on a 12" laptop

sub lesson to point #2: Don't try to code Rails 18 hours a day on a Windows laptop. It's a joke.

To Rails Newbies/Rails Coders on Windows: Don't ever code rails on windows! Ruby is dog slow on windows. Use linux or OS X

This looks like a troll post, but this is actually good advice. Don't try to force a good Ruby environment on Windows. Instead, merely edit your source code on Windows, and use PuTTy to SSH into a Linux machine that runs your development Ruby on Rails installation. This will also help enforce best practices like keeping your source code in source control instead of hacking it bits-to-metal on your local machine.

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