Learning Ruby on Rails

Since I enjoy using the web I have decided to try and create a few web applications that I have been thinking about. Even though I have been programming for a long time, I have never actually created a web application before, only a few websites in basic HTML.

Ruby on Rails has a lot of attention lately so I bought the book Agile Web Development with Rails and am about half way through it. I created the demo Depot application and have started to create my own application in the last few days. The application is related to weblogs and I hope to have an initial version up and running by August 13. It seems to be going good so far so I will update my progress here over the next little while and post a link to the app when it is up.

Blogging goal

In this post at The Simple Dollar weblog, it suggests to set a goal of increasing site visitors by a certain percentage every month for the first year or two. I am going to try and follow that goal for myself, and on March 31 I am going to track how many hits I have received and attempt to grow that number by 35% per month for the next year.

I have currently received about 400 views so far so if I am able to accomplish that, I should have about 15,000 views per month in about one year’s time. I will update my progress from time to time over the year to see how it’s going.

Reading goal for next year

In a past post, I wrote about how I have cut down the number of books on my potential reading list to a more manageable amount, and that I read approximately 30 books per year.

My reading generally falls into the categories of business books and computer books, with some general non-fiction and fiction as well. I am going to list the books that I am planning to read in the next year in all four categories. Hopefully I can accomplish the goal of reading all of these books by the end of March 2008! I have chosen 35 books, which is a little higher than my average pace, but I think I can do it.

Business – Here I lean towards books about entrepreneurship, with an interest in lean and theory of constraints as well. I began with the Personal MBA, of which I have now read 17 of the 42 books, and my list has grown from there.

• Are Your Lights On? – Weinberg
• First, Break All the Rules – Buckingham
• Great Boss Dead Boss – Immelman
• The Soul of a New Machine – Kidder
• Lean Thinking – Womack, Jones
• On Becoming a Leader – Bennis
• The 80/20 Individual – Koch
• The Bootstrapper’s Bible – Godin
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany – Blank
• Thinking for a Change – Scheinkopf

Computer – I am most interested in “timeless” books, rather than books about the latest technologies.

• Agile Web Development with Rails – Thomas, Hansson, Breedt, Clark
• Don’t Make Me Think – Krug
• Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design – McLaughlin, Pollice, West
• Programming Pearls – Bentley
• Software Architecture in Practice – Bass, Clements, Kazman
• Code Complete 2 – McConnell
• Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture – Fowler
• The Pragmatic Programmer – Hunt, Thomas
• Software By Numbers – Denne, Cleland-Huang
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – Abelson, Sussman

Non-Fiction – I am interested in books about personal success and goals. My wife and I just had a baby girl so I am also starting to become interested in parenting/education books as well.

• The Abolition of Man – Lewis
• The Mismeasure of Man – Gould
• You are the Message – Ailes
• Mindset – Dweck
• The Hero With a Thousand Faces – Campbell
• The Well-Trained Mind – Bauer
• More Than You Know – Mauboussin
• The Language of God – Collins
• The Now Habit – Fiore
• Your Best Year Yet – Ditzler

Fiction – Here my taste leans to “classics” but I do enjoy current fiction as well.

• The Fountainhead – Rand
• Ishmael – Quinn
• Narcissus and Goldmund – Hesse
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Solzhenitsyn
• The Stranger – Camus

Wasting time online

Dennis Forbes, in a post yesterday discusses how much time some of us spend online everyday, on sites like Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, or reading blogs.

I have felt the same way lately and this week from March 3 to March 9 I decided to look at the front pages of Digg, Reddit, and the popular page at Del.icio.us once each day and count how many of the links that I personally found interesting. These have been some of the places I have looked lately for interesting content. I have to admit that I was surprised by how few of the links I found truly interesting.

Here are my results:

• Del.icio.us/popular: 14/189 = 7.4%
• Digg: 3/105 = 2.9%
• Reddit: 21/175 = 12%

Recently I have “felt” that I have liked Del.icio.us and Reddit much more than Digg but I expected the percentage of posts that I wanted to click to be higher than 12%. And in fact, one of the days this week Reddit was inundated with posts on one particular topic.

Dennis Forbes asks what we could have accomplished in the time we squandered? One of my goals for the near future is to try and build a web application in my spare time. I have a couple of ideas I would like to try out and also I would like to try web programming since most of my programming experience has been Windows or Linux apps. I am going to try and reduce the time I spend aimlessly looking for interesting links and try to do something more productive instead.

What is the most important problem one can work on?

One of the 100 or so weblogs that I subscribe to is Ian Foster’s weblog. He is a leader and visionary in the field of grid computing. I subscribed to his weblog because I am currently working in grid computing at the Grid Research Centre.

One post of his particularly stood out to me even though it doesn’t relate to grid computing directly. He suggests that we ask ourselves what is the most important problem that one can work on? His potential answer is “energy” which makes sense given our increasing energy needs and the need to find cleaner sources. I think the value in asking this question is that we all can have a different answer.

Writing this weblog I think is an attempt for me to try and figure out the answer to this question for myself.

I hope a post a day isn’t too frequent

This article by Darren Rowse suggests 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog. First on the list is too many posts. I am currently subscribed to about 100 blogs and I have unsubscribed to blogs based on several of these, including too many posts (#1), infrequent posting (#2), and partial feeds (#3). I personally don’t like partial feeds the most–that would have been my number one answer.

My goal for starting out on my blog is to post once per day. I hope to keep this up for a year. I especially want to do it for at least 30 days straight to establish it as a habit, as Steve Pavlina suggests in 30 Days to Success. Hopefully that won’t cost me any subscribers. Although since I don’t have any yet maybe I shouldn’t be too worried! I would imagine it’s the blogs that post many times a day that really tire people out though.

It may be difficult to post every day–each post is taking about 20 minutes to write–but I hope I will be able to write longer posts more quickly when it truly becomes a habit. I also look forward to finding out what I am most interested in writing about, and hopefully developing an audience of some kind.