Hello World
I’ve finally gotten around to starting a blog and figured that I should kick it off with a quick intro so you’ll know what I’m going to write about here.
So my main interest is programming, and learning how to become better at my craft. I think I’ll probably focus on Ruby which is my favorite language, but I may branch off into other languages that I’m interested in or subjects related to development.
My main reason for wanting to blog was that while I’ve been a developer for over 10 years, the longer I code for, the more obvious some of the holes in my knowledge become (to me at least). I hope in trying to explain concepts that are challenging to me I can better understand them.
Also I have some ideas and practices that I haven’t seen anyone talk about before. I think they are good, but I wanted to put them out there and see if that’s true or not. I’m sure the internet will tell me when when I’m wrong.
Actually in some ways I hope that this experience is similar to the one I’ve had contributing to open source projects. A few years ago I began to steadily increase the amount of contributions to different projects, and one in particular called DataMapper.
For those of you who don’t know, DataMapper is an ORM for Ruby that allows you to map your ruby instances to almost any kind of datastore. ORM isn’t really even a good word to describe it, because it works non-relational datastores too. There are adapters for most popular NoSQL systems, YAML/CSV files, web services and lots of other things. It provides a clean, simple, consistent ruby API to all those services and more.
Anyway, I thought I was a pretty good developer until I started contributing code that others relied on for their own projects. I found that while I was decent, writing libraries is so much more challenging than applications. I made a ton of mistakes that I think I’ve learned from. I also found that putting code out for others to see caused me to try to make sure it was as good as possible.
I still feel like I have a long way to go, but without a doubt I can say that contributing to open source has been the single best decision I’ve made to improve my abilities as a developer. If putting my ideas out in a blog even brings 1/10th the benefit then it will be time well spent.
