Blog | Rubyyot

Today was a humbling experience, but it highlighted the reasons for my goals for the year.   I have a project in it’s early phases that I can’t decide on a path forward for.   The problem is Ruby on Rails, it must be.  Shifting gears between Ruby on Rails and ASP.NET WebForms is like night and day.   I have a number of these WebForms projects on a common codebase.  The codebase is my own, I hesitate to call it a framework, but it is in production and working well.  It has tests covering the interesting bits of code and it’s built in a more traditional data-layer, business-object-ish layer and you can set WebForms on top of it all.

Writing it was a good learning experience.  I got to know Generics, Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control, and some interesting aspects of designing re-usable code.  However, there is one major problem with it.  I hate it.  Well that’s not 100% true, I’m proud of having written it and that it works, but I don’t enjoy using it.  There is 0 Rails MVC goodness in it and I feel like I am constantly violating the DRY principle despite my best efforts not to.

Back to my project.  I originally decided to to write it in Castle Monorail.  I was excited but a bit puzzled by the “distributed” documentation and the variety of options available to me, but I took it in stride as Ruby on Rails seems to have a new improved way to do things every week or so.   I settled on using MicroKernel with Brail as my options with trusty NUnit as my testing framework.   Before long I made a complete mess of everything and had to rewind.  Take two turned out a little better, but fizzled out as well. 

After a while, I really didn’t want to work with it anymore since I had begun to equate working in Monorail with being confused and frustrated and doing sub-standard work.   I decided to go back to WebForms since that is a known quantitiy but after doing some fairly interesting work and spending a couple weeks on it, I realized that I had done fairly little on the project itself and a large amount of work trying to bend my codebase to do some Railsish things. 

Then came the Holidays, and my family was kind enough to let me feverishly hack at Ruby among other things.  I learned to use Cucumber and touched on Shoes.  I played with Webrat and Machinist and it was all good.  That was when I decided to give Monorail another try.  Which leads me to today….

I started out by signing up for an account at Codeplex and looking around there to see if there was anything of interest brewing in the .NET community.  I found two interesting projects, Faker and FluentSpec and set in to making an Castle ActiveRecord assembly for my domain.   Before long I was floundering,  without the flow.   I spent hours tinkering and researching until finally I came across the following two posts.

1. Advanced Mocking Senarios with Active Record and RhinoMocks
2. TDDing Controllers

That was when it all started coming together and after hours of feeling like an idiot, I ended the day feeling like I had accomplished something.  That is the feeling I want for 2009.  The feeling of stepping out of confusion and self-doubt into the satisfaction of accomplishment.    The exhilaration of seeing it all come together.  

Now that I have completed my rather circuitous route to the goals portion of this post,  let me move on without further ado to listing out my goals for 2009.

• Spend more family time - My obsession for all things technical often shrinks family time.  I must find a better balance here.
• Continue learning in Ruby and .NET - I made great strides in both of these areas in the past year.  That is no reason to let dust settle on my skills.
• Learn Erlang - I chose this functional language to learn in 2009 because of it’s distributed nature and it’s threading ability.
• Exercise frequently - I’m not looking to go out and run a marathon, but if I can walk or drive somewhere, I need to take the walking option.
• Stop trying to organize, and start simplifying - I think that the clutter is what is sapping my time and energy, and diverting me from my goals.
• Become financially stable - I will have an emergency fund and know where all my money goes by the end of the year if not sooner.
• Contribute - I would like to become involved in open source projects of my own or others.
• Teach - My kids think that most of what I do on the computer is magic.  I would like to teach them how if they want to learn.  Hackety.org and Shoes is looking like a great place to start.
• Enjoy the journey- Funny that I read that post after the day of frustration that I had.  Thinking back, the figuring it out is as fun as the accomplishment of having done it, if I allow it to be.
• Quit smoking - There I said it, though my heart is not fully in it yet.

That is a tall list of goals; can I do it all in 2009?  I am not sure.  If I keep plugging away at it day after day, I might.  Regardless the effort put into it will be rewarding, as I will definately make significant strides toward these goals and (hopefully) learn to enjoy the journey.

One of my goals for 2009 is to become more financially stable.   To help me get this off of the ground, one of the things I’ve done is that I’ve added the blog The Simple Dollar to my reader.   I try not to clutter up my feeds with topic unrelated to my focus or other things that clutter, and so far this one has been on target for my goal; so it’s here to stay, for now. 

As you probably know if you are reading this.  I have set up rubyyot.com as a site to help me to get Getting Things Done (GTD) off the ground.   This has served two purposes, the first is just that, implementing GTD.  The second is that I needed a project to get me back into working with Ruby on Rails and Ruby in general.  It has served the latter more that the former so far, but I’m working on that.

Today while reading through my feeds I came across a review of Making it All Work which is a new book by David Allen, author of GTD.  While this review gave me ideas for a number of improvements to my site, it also got me thinking about the concept of perspective;  specifically the Purpose and Principles portion. 

The new year has me already thinking about where I’m at and where I want to be, but this idea got me to take a step back and start intropecting. 

What has initially become of it is that I decided to get things going on this blog with a post about where I am at the moment, or rather what has led up to this point.  I will follow up with another post on where I see myself going in 2009 and what thing I would like to achieve.

2008

Most people I’ve talked to have said that 2008 was a rough year and I tend to agree with them.  In the larger scale of things we have the US financial system crumbling as well as the US ecomomy in general.   This is having a great effect on people,  myself more directly than some others.  The war is Iraq is dragging on without end in sight, though this seems to have been out of the news (or at least what little news I read) lately.

Personally, my family has been plauged by a number of health issues in the past year.   The year (2008)  started out with plans for separation and possibly divorce.  Work was chaos, finishing the year with my company going bankrupt and subsequently bought out and restructured.   Getting financially stable was a goal of mine in 2008 at which I failed miserably.  It seems that every time things are looking up on that front,  some major expense or emergency would come up and set me back to square one.

Now I am a pessimist by nature and so more often that not I will see only the bad and ignore that good.   Looking that the bad (above) is pretty daunting and it’s hard to believe that we came through it all in one piece.  However there are some good things that happened in 2008 as well.

• We overcame difficult times- This one is obvious, but is a positve way to look at it all.   2008 brought a lot of change, but with it are opportunities. 
• My family is still intact - I am really happy about this one.
• I still have a job - My company may have bit the dust, but I am not unemployed.
• C# - I may have previously used C#, but now I’m comfortable saying that I know C#.
• Rubyyot.com - I’ve owned the domain for years, but I finally got the domain off the ground.
• Ruby and Rails - I found them years ago, but while I loved Ruby, I stopped using it.  Now I’m using them again.
• FOSS, TDD, ALT.NET, Agile - I am pro open source software, I use Linux exclusively at home, but my job is strictly .NET.  This year I’ve been bringing FOSS goodness into the workplace with NUnit, Monorail and Ninject.

Once I get started, the good list makes 2008 look like a good year.   This brings me back around to perspective.  Interesting.

I’ve started and stopped blogging at various times and for various reasons. Now I’ve started again because I’ve realized that I need a centralized location for my output. Naturally I setup a blog (again). We’ll see how long it lasts. I am hoping to talk about my experiences with Ruby, Rails, .NET and new for 2009 (hopefully) Erlang with occational stops into my personal life or other areas. We will see what happens.