Posted:
5 days ago
(2010-07-24 17:22:19 UTC )
There's a natural ebb and flow in most human undertakings. Advance and retrench, write and rewrite, code something and maintain it.
If you create, create, create and never maintain, you get a huge mess. If you write and never rewrite, you never live up to your full potential. Not a big surprise.
Creation is more glamorous than maintenance, of course. None of the programmers in the greatest demand would take a pure maintenance coding job. You think of great writers writing, but few think about how often the revise and rewrite. Taking territory is the stuff war films are made of, but solidifying and fortifying is a footnote on the way to the important stuff.
Less obviously, there's a personal balance between creation and maintenance. Everybody's different, but you've got some personal best level of creation versus maintenance in what you do. You're probably biased a bit in favor of creation from your natural balance since it's considered more glamorous, but there is some actual natural level for you.
When you get out of whack, it's easy to get burned out. "Too much creation" is a bit like happy burnout, or it may just feel like too much work. Too much maintenance, though, probably just feels like you're dragging and uninspired. I know that's how it feels to me.
When in doubt, consider doing a bit of work on your own. I know, more work as a solution to burnout sounds stupid, but the trick is in the kind of work. Put away your vital, important, possibly lucrative maintenance work for a bit, and do a bit of creation on the side, just for the love of it. You can probably use it.
Posted:
2 weeks ago
(2010-07-10 16:55:22 UTC )
/ Updated:
2 weeks ago
(2010-07-10 16:56:23 UTC )
Part One of the Refactor It Rails 3 tutorial and part two of the same are ready for reading. Have a look!
Posted:
3 weeks ago
(2010-07-06 06:58:06 UTC )
Yay for long weekends! My portfolio has just gotten a lot prettier. Go look at the portfolio goodness and then tell me you hate the color scheme ;-)
I also added a few fixups to this blog, but nothing big. The estimated time in the "posted at"/"updated at" line is the biggest visible change, though there are a few nice invisible changes that'll help me out.
Posted:
5 weeks ago
(2010-06-24 06:32:56 UTC )
The new simple project I've been working on, tentatively called "Refactor It", is now a Minimum Viable Product. You can find the code on GitHub. It should shortly be available as Refactor It on refactor.angelbob.com, as soon as I switch to Passenger -- Mongrel doesn't fully play nice with Rails 2.3.8. I may get it its own domain, depending how I feel about it.
There's plenty of polish that hasn't happened, especially visually. Still, it's among the prettiest version 0.1 products I've produced.
Posted:
7 weeks ago
(2010-06-08 22:57:57 UTC )
/ Updated:
7 weeks ago
(2010-06-09 17:16:01 UTC )
Apparently if you install the MongoDB API, it's important to set the ulimit -n to something higher than the default 1024 on Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Debian.
Otherwise you can get a cryptic exception.
It would be nice if they documented that fact clearly somewhere.
Posted:
7 weeks ago
(2010-06-08 06:11:39 UTC )
/ Updated:
7 weeks ago
(2010-06-08 21:36:06 UTC )
It looks like RubyGems.org is currently down. Until it comes back up, we'll keep getting this message...
Update: a temporary fix, since DNS is down but the site is up, can be found here: http://gist.github.com/429688
