An Experiment in Scotch

So my plan is to doc­u­ment how­ever long this lit­tle no hav­ing a job exper­i­ment goes on. My apolo­gies for 95% of my read­ers who are non-technical but most of these lit­tle daily sum­maries will be focused on my learn­ing process. I’m set­ting the clock as of yes­ter­day since the first two days of the exper­i­ment last week were more mop-up type days, get­ting lit­tle items out of the way of the exper­i­ment. I didn’t doc­u­ment yes­ter­day with any­thing more than my pre­vi­ous post. I’m sure you can under­stand why.

So Day 2 has been infi­nitely bet­ter than yes­ter­day. I spent 4 hours this morn­ing work­ing on a lit­tle con­sult­ing gig I’ve got going on the side. It’s a .Net project and I’m build­ing a very rudi­men­tary email sys­tem for the client that sends out newslet­ters occa­sion­ally to the users. Send­ing auto­matic emails turns out to be harder than you might expect given all the pos­si­ble email clients and what­not, thought the .Net frame­work makes it at least doable (thank you Alter­nat­e­View!). That’s not really very sexy work so plan to do it in the morn­ings while I’m still rel­a­tively fresh and motivated.

This after­noon wasn’t nearly as pro­duc­tive as the morn­ing. The events of yes­ter­day weighed heav­ily on my abil­ity to con­cen­trate and I didn’t really dive into much until after 4. Once I man­aged to do that, I started work­ing through the Quick­Wiki tuto­r­ial for Pylons. Pylons is a frame­work for writ­ing Python web pages and is very sim­i­lar as best I can tell to the Rails frame­work for Ruby. I choose Pylons over Rails because I “know” Python whereas I would have to learn both Ruby and Rails to be at all pro­duc­tive there.

I fin­ished up the tuto­r­ial and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with how easy it is to work with Pylons. There is a ton of stuff going on but it just feels so much more sane than ASP.Net devel­op­ment. In the last few weeks at my pre­vi­ous employer, I was work­ing on rewrit­ing a web site in ASP.net 2.0 to use a MVC pat­tern and it’s just not very easy in ASP.Net. With Pylons, it’s a piece of cake. My plan is to revisit the tuto­r­ial in the morn­ing first thing and get more com­fort­able with the frame­work pieces I’ve encoun­tered. Once that mod­est goal is com­plete, I’m begin work on a cou­ple of pet projects that I’ve been putting off for quite awhile.

I feel some pres­sure to make up for lost time but I also know that I’ve got some seri­ous learn­ing to do. I’m look­ing for­ward to the next few days.