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:
9 days ago
(2010-07-21 02:07:44 UTC )
Lots more updates to the Rails 3 Refactor It tutorial pages and github repo. More little tweaks to the blog here and there.
I'm definitely feeling the happy burnout right now, but lots of good stuff is getting done. Some of it's at work, but interesting stuff is going on.
An update to CheapToad should be (finally) happening soon. They added versioning to the notices URL, which is nice. They changed to XML format on the data, which is okay. They switched to using a real gem (finally!). So, y'know, go them, overall.
Posted:
2 weeks ago
(2010-07-15 02:31:40 UTC )
If you're having trouble running "rails generator devise:install", remember to add the devise gem to the bundler!
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:
4 weeks ago
(2010-07-01 01:19:50 UTC )
/ Updated:
4 weeks ago
(2010-07-01 01:20:29 UTC )
I'm starting a tutorial on writing the Refactor It app in Rails 3. Not coincidentally, I've added a "pages" section to this blog to more easily code up Rails views with little to no controller logic backing them up, but access to Rails plugins and helpers (like Harsh, the syntax formatter I'm using).
