- Learning Rails – Day II
Well, I spent the second half of today (and >4 hours at Farmer Boys) working on my Whirlfood project in Rails and made a surprising amount of progress. Took some time to start to get used to the Rails methodology and the Ruby language syntax, but I think I’m in pretty good shape now.
Got to admit, I’m starting to like Rails for rapid development. After 2 days, I feel like I can build a simple web app almost as quickly as I can using C#. Which completely amazes me. Of course, there are lots of complex things and specialized functions that I still don’t know how to do in Rails, but still, I’m pretty stunned. In a good way.
- The Building-Learning Paradox
If you want to learn a new langauge or framework you need a good project idea as the basis for what you’re building as you learn. But if you have a good project idea to work on, you want to get it to market as soon as possible. I present to you The Building-Learning Paradox.
I conjecture that this paradox is the reason that highly motivated people tend to learn in smaller incremental steps rather than diving head-first into a new technology. It’s basically impossible to satisfy both these main motivators at once. Not 100% sure what I’m going to do for this project I’m working on right now, but I think I’m going to sacrifice speed in order to learn something new. We’ll see if I can keep that up for very long.
How do you deal with this paradox? I’m curious.
- Learning Rails – Day I
I’ve been reading up a bit on Ruby and think I have a passable handle on the syntax. Also studied the structure of Rails apps. So now it’s time to actually build something to actually learn it. And because I have no patience for more Hello World examples, I’m going to build something actually useful.
Only problem is that I don’t have any tiny project ideas right now. So I’m going to re-work an existing idea and build a social restaurant recommendation site, based on my previous (poorly-named) Edahh project. If it turns out well, it might just be the basis for a re-launch of that service.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first:
$ rails whirlfood -d mysql
And the adventure begins.
- Why Ruby on Rails vs C#?
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time lately trying out a variety of development technologies and one of those is Ruby on Rails. I haven’t yet figured out exactly why people are so excited about it. Perhaps it’s because the convention-over-configuration methodology hides quite a bit of complexity from the developer. But my issue with it is simple – I like to be in control of my software and I like more explicit design.
- What Makes a Great Employee?
“So complex is the human spirit that it can itself scarce discern the deep springs which impel it to action.” - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
It is human nature to think that we truly understand the world around us. This is especially true of our individual perceptions of human interactions. We believe that we understand what motivates our employees. Likewise, we think we understand what is important when placing an employee into a new position, trusting our intuition. But, it turns out that in many cases, the most important factors based upon behavioral science in employee selection are counter-intuitive.
- The Real Formula for Success
I can’t remember where I saw this, but the truth of it really struck me.
- Three Ways to Manage a Project
I’m an avid read of Seth Godin’s blog and most of his posts really hit a nerve for me. But this morning, reading his post titled Direct and Useful Project Feedback, I started thinking about how I run and get involved in projects and it echoed back to my post about personal motivation and innovation. I can’t work in the sort of environment he describes in scenario #1 wherein the team just does what it’s told. And I totally agree that there is quite a bit of difference between #2 and #3. Building a “great product” nearly always yields a product that you can be proud of (though maybe not a product that you “love”). But the inverse clearly isn’t always true. Good insight as always…
- HOWTO: Export IIS7 Configuration to Another Webserver
IIS7 has this great new feature called Shared Configuration. Except that it has a tendency to do horrible things which usually result in all the websites and application pools being removed from your server and your production website starting to serve 503 Service Unavailable errors.
For an innexplicable reason, Microsoft decided to kill the Export function from IIS7 in favor of this new feature. But for those of us who don’t trust technology, we like to do things manually and to get a repeatable result that doesn’t update automatically when we least expect it. Yes, I am the sort of person who wonders why the default Windows Update on servers is to Install and Reboot Automatically at 2am…
In any case, in a simple 3 step process you too can export and import your Internet Information Server 7 websites and app pools. (more…)
- Motivation and Innovation
I have done nothing truly innovative in the first 155 days of 2009.
This is what I have come to recognize as the cause of my current state of discontent. I have been doing a lot of self-reflection lately, which of course only happens when I have too much time for self-reflection. My preference is to occupy myself with exciting (read: cutting edge, innovative) projects rather than silly introspection.
Now, it’s true that I have done several things this year with which I’m quite satisfied. I’ve started making some good friends here in LA as the two-year anniversary of my moving west has come and gone. We added the Atlanta Braves as yet another flagship Photocore client. I was involved in launching a free career assessment aimed at helping young people understand themselves and find their ideal job (more about that later). But none of these satisfy my basal thirst for innovation.
- What _is_ Photocore?
According to my USPTO trademark application, Photocore is “Computer software for organizing, archiving, viewing and distributing images and photographs over a network”. I think that pretty much sums it up.
Photocore will be available for limited licensing at the beginning of 2007.
Right now I have two showcase sites, both with very similar layouts at the moment.
- theGooley.com – my personal photo website
- USPresswire.com (login required) – a wire agency using Photocore to ingest, broadcast and distribute images to clients
If you’re serious about wanting to see how Photocore looks with >100 photographers, >100k images and >2.5M bits of metadata, send me an email and I can give you a demo login to the site.
Now, a little history after the jump…
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