Monthly Archives: January 2008

Non-Daily Semi-Progress: 2008.01.23

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So, the little side project that could. Hm. It’s coming along. Unfortunately, as always, I haven’t spent nearly as much time as I want, however, I’ve had a number of very cool little breakthroughs in the past couple of days. Working on average an hour-and-a-half a night I’ve gotten to the point of consuming RSS feeds. So here’s where it gets exciting: it was stupidly easy to consume them. And since the framework below it now can deal with similar item types it shouldn’t be hard to absorb the data.

Daily Non-Progress: 2008.01.20

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Writing applications is a funny thing. They apparently take a lot of time to do, and to do well. About the time of the last posting I had just found myself instantly unemployed.

I had been doing a massive rush-job at work to get new features in and fix old ones up. It was clear that whole thing needed an overhaul. And just as I was about to get on it … poof! My job went bye-bye.

I wondered what to do. I had been thinking about quitting anyways and taking a couple months to get back into life. But the recruiters were constantly calling and so I took the bait. I did interviews for about two weeks and then landed a job in San Francisco. At least I was going to be closer to home.

It turned out to be quite the massive programming effort too. And somewhere around the middle of September we released the first version of our product. So, from about August onward I really had no energy. And then I went traveling again…

But I’m back. I had tabled a bunch of ideas but I couldn’t ignore them any longer. Over Christmas I got to thinking about what it would take to get these projects going again. And then about a week ago I pulled the Ruby on Rails books from my shelf and dusted them off…

A brand new system is up and running now. It does the rudimentary object cataloging, user registration, invitation system, user management, and even some administration things. I’m working about 1x every other day on this and I’m actually impressed how far it has come. I can store comments, URLs, YouTube links, and MetaCafe links. At this rate I should have the invitation system done in a day or two more and then I’ll be able to turn my attention towards styling this beast.

What is it? Well. Hm. A long time ago I had an idea I taped up on my bedroom wall. I had a ginormously complex system graphed out and it was going to be super robust, I18N-ed, and all that. But what I lacked was development speed. So I’m back and developing on my Mac atop the RMagick Rails Mar 2007 framework for Locomotive, I’m using a simple MySQL database, and I’ve eschewed I18N and A11Y for now. This could bite me later, but right now I need proof of concept up and running…