100 Days!

Introduction

First up: I updated my portfolio! The base, anyway. Projects still need to be added. You can view it here: SILENTPOST It’s built with GitHub Pages, which use Jekyll. More detail on that in a future post. Now that that’s out of the way, on to my Ruby update. I’ve crossed the threshold! It’s a completely arbitrary threshold I set for myself, but it feels pretty good. This post will be a reflection of everything I’ve learned over the last 100 days. A bit serendipitous that I’m wrapping up these 100 days on the eve of RailsConf 2014. Perhaps next year I’ll be going? To be honest, I thought I’d have more completed projects to show, but I really should know myself by now. Projects have been schizophrenic and varied–jumping from a URL shortener to an image to ASCII art converter and a storefront–because I get bored easily. The good news (for me) is, most of these projects are looking to wrap up at the same time. The image to ASCII art converter (lovingly called "imgii") I started is wrapping up. I’m developing a gem from the proof of concept, and will be using it in a couple of dumb projects I have some ideas for. Publishing a gem is a pretty cool feeling. The url shortener is pretty much finished; it just needs a facelift from the front-end. While I usually enjoy that sort of thing, I really want to focus on Rails and not developing a UI, so it’s been put off for a while. The storefront is riffing off of the Agile Web Development with Rails 4 book I got a couple of weeks ago. Instead of following closely with the book, I’m deviating pretty seriously in an attempt to complete a large-scale app with only light handholding. GitHub’s contributions calendar has been a great version of Jerry Seinfield’s “Don’t break the chain” system for getting better at development in general. Even if I didn’t feel like working on anything, I felt compelled to keep up my contributions streak. That obligation grows stronger the more entrenched I get, which I think is a good thing from a “get better” standpoint. That’s all for now. Looking forward to continuing development, and here’s to the next 100 days!