Kognitive Jelly

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that I just can’t get enough information into my head fast enough. My mind is constantly racing with ideas that I’ve been picking up through reading books, blogs, listening to podcasts, and actually working on projects. The more I learn, the more I want to know. I’ve always enjoyed programming and felt the same affinity for it as IT, however lately I find myself being drawn to programming more and more. Technology excites me and the prospect of leveraging new technology through programs I have written excites me even more. It’s a simple passion, but I like it that way because it gives me the freedom to truly enjoy the learning process.

In an effort to increase my skillset I have embarked on the journey of trying to get an MCSD certification. I know a lot of Rubyists would be shocked to hear such a thing, most people go the other direction. However, I am not abandoning Ruby, rather just “sweetening the pot.”

The path that I will be pursuing will be the C# path, and I’ve already begun to take a look at it. It’s amazing how easy it is to pick this language up. I picked up a book on this yesterday and going through the exercises I am already half way through it. I will say that having spent the last 7 months learning/working with Ruby has definitely prepared me for the object oriented approach in C#. While C# is more verbose than Ruby, I can still see myself having fun with the language. Also if John Lam or the Ruby.NET team continue to make progress with their projects, using Ruby to work on the .NET platform will be a breeze (and since I’m not a big fan of IIS, I’ll be eager to see how these projects work with Mono & Apache).

Man…. When it rains it pours. The automation system upgrade didn’t go according to plan and we had to roll back the changes. Unfortunately, the roll back made things worse, and we discovered that there was a time stamping problem so our automated backups were failing but not reporting that they were failing. As a result the database is being slowly reconstructed and updated by hand (yuk!).

It is now 10:35am and I haven’t gone home yet (got here at 7pm yesterday). At least when I’m done with this my weekend begins.

I thought the title of an ok CD by DJ Dan would be perfect to borrow for this blog post.

I’m here at work for some maintenance to the automation system as well as our Samba server. Unfortunately the Samba server had some unexpected complications but I was eventually able to get it sorted out. Next is to get an additional two machines up and running in the automation system and then upgrade the software system wide.

If Craig & Mike get finished there will be room for the another 3 servers in the rack which are desperately needed.

I had totally forgotten about Cygwin until today when I came across a text editor for windows that can use textmate bundles. In their forum there was a post about e needing Cygwin to do some of its automation.

I used to cygwin years ago, and the idea of having unix tools on windows is extremely appealing. Microsoft is only recently coming on board with the idea of command line automation scripting with their introduction of Powershell. Powershell is definately something I’ll look into. Still, its nice to be able to install tools that are intended for linux or mac use and not have to set up a virtual environment to play with them.

I’m also looking forward to seeing how well e works.

A week or so ago I downloaded the peepcode screencast on Test First Development. It was the first really clear example on Test Driven Development I’d seen and it helped clear up a lot of questions I’d had about it.

I was introduced to the idea of writing code based tests when I started learning about Ruby on Rails. When learning PHP (or any other language for that matter) it was not something mentioned in any of the literature I had encountered. But as Rails takes an “agile” approach to things, writing tests are an expected part of development.

Shortly after beginning my exploration of Rails I was hanging out in the #railsonrails IRC channel and Luke Redpath was talking about Behavior Driven Development (BDD) a variation of Test Driven Development (TDD). I was totally lost but wanted more information. He suggested reading Kent Beck’s book “Test Driven Development By Example” first and get familiar with that before trying to wrap my head around BDD. I promptly added it to my Amazon Wishlist and there it stayed until today. After watching that peepcode episode, I decided that I would finally plunk down for a copy of the book and today it arrived in the mail.

As the title suggests, this is my first book specifically about Agile Methodologies. While the Agile Web Development with Rails book is technically an Agile book it is more about the Rails framework than evangelizing and explaining any specific processes or philosophies. I’m looking forward to exploring the world of writing automated tests for my code prior to doing any sort of development. Hopefully it is as helpful as I expect it to be.