Posts Tagged ‘Ruby on Rails’

Scratching my itch

21 September, 2007

I’ve been annoyed by the lack of a good task-manager for quite some time now, trying just about every solution out there. OmniOutliner – too general-purpose, OmniFocus – too bloated/GTD, GooToDo – too crappy UI and poor philosophy, TadaList – too simple, RememberTheMilk – too plain messy (though I still love the name)… so, triggered by my girlfriend’s overuse of post-its, I’ve decided to go at it on my own, building my own interpretation of how one should organize one’s daily work for maximum productivity and inner peace.

And by “daily work”, I mean just that. Too many task-managers have a tendency to try and be a substitute for MS Project, Merlin or even SAP. A task manager needs to reflect the fact that tasks change in nature, timing etc. It needs to have features and a philosophy supporting that.

Probably nothing you would pitch too your average VC… though it might not be such a bad idea: “Productivity/stress is a huge problem most companies, I have a product that increases productivity by at least 25 percent, and stress by 25 percent. With the world economy turning over about 1 gagillion each year, our product could be worth at least 0.25 gagillion, plus future cashflows.” The sick thing is, that with a polished executive summare and the right team – meaning people that are old and managed a complicated main frame start-up in the eighties and then went off to work for IBM, or that were early employees of a successful start-up (founders of a successful start-up seldom need financing for an idea with zero traction) – you could probably pull it off.

My app will be “opinionated software”, which is fancy talk for that I know best :) But if you do have any suggestions, give it to me! And yeah, I’ll building it in Rails and (if I have time) a desktop-client in AIR. Always nice to have an excuse to polish up on those coding skills.

Oh Joy(ent)!

21 August, 2007

If you’re looking for a webhost that has practically everything one could ever wish for, Joyent is the best I’ve seen (and I’ve seen to many to mention). Fast, easy to use and clever toolbox for users. One could only wish that everything online will get this well polished eventually.

Cruising on Rails

31 January, 2007

So I’ve continued my quest for Rails mastery. Problem has been, that all books have assumed that you have decent programming skills (which I don’t) before picking up that particular book. Since it seems a bit awkward to learn say PHP first, to attack Ruby/Rails second, and since there are no decent general “learn to program” books… I basically had to go at it with brute force. This is how:

- Skim thru first chapter of all books I’ve bought (which is practically every book written on Ruby/Rails)
- Select the book that seemed the easiest.
- Read/use that book until the point to which I don’t really know what’s going on.
- Read/use the book a little bit more.
- Select the book that seems the easisest.
- Read/use that book until the point to which I don’t really know what’s going on.
- Read/use the book a little bit more.
- Etc. etc. etc.

Any suggestions?

Ruby is a non-programmers best friend

9 January, 2007

So I’ve decided to take up programming. For real. It’s a bit tragic that I haven’t done a real effort earlier in my life, but on the flip side then I would probably be stuck with a perl-hammer, thinking that every possible software-project is looking like a perl-shaped nail… if you know what I mean.

But now we have Rails. This magic Ruby-based framework that can create Web 2.0-apps while I’m doing dishes. Or so you would think after looking at screencasts or believing what you read in the bloggosphere. Anyhow, in Sweden noone uses Rails. Seems like we quite enjoy doing things the macho-way. But not me, so here we are.

My humble ambition is to build a e-commerce-site/wiki/social network. Being able to do that from scratch with very limited programming experience should really put Rails to the test.

I started (and finished) Learn to program, which was a rather light snack but worthwhile. I’m finishing up the much-talked-about Poignants guide to Ruby now and after that I’ll continue by digesting Agile development with Rails, which is also quite the hype. I’ll keep you posted on my progress (or lack thereof). Wish me luck!