Hello there.

This is a new blog where I intend to document any new things I learn within the realm of software development. Like jazz music, this is primarily for my own amusement but should anyone else benefit from this exercise then that’s good too.

I’ve got 13 years professional experience yet I believe the times we now find ourselves in to be the most exciting I’ve known. There’s so much interesting stuff flying about these days, it’s amazing.

Long ago I was in a corporate rut. Sure we were doing some pretty neat things with C++ and COM (that dates it!) but we were in our little silo and everybody else was in theirs. The global fraternity of developers that we now know was unimaginable until recently. We had the Borland email circular and that was about it. Now we’re all in touch on Twitter and collaborating with strangers on open source projects in Github. This rising tide lifts all boats.

My areas of interest are dotNet for business and Ruby for pleasure. Hopefully the Ruby can be inveigled into the business zone too moving forward. (I’ve already made a start on that process!)

What I really want to get a handle on in the coming months as the dark night draw in are:

• Testing
• Sass/Compass
• Coffee Script

I’ve already converted a Ruby on Rails app to 3.1 and activated the asset pipeline so the Sass and Coffee Script shouldn’t require too much setting up in order to get started. Also this Octopress blog engine uses Sass so that’s something else to poke around with. I can really see how both technologies improve what has preceded them and I’m keen to get my hands on them.

As regards testing, whilst I’m totally sold on the idea I just haven’t got to grips with it yet. I read on Twitter a while back, ‘Test Driven Development is the “rock hard abs” of programming. Everybody wants it. Nobody wants to do the work to get it.’ I know that I’ve got to knuckle down and get it sorted. But alas it’s too easy to just write code and load up the resultant site in the browser.

Fingers crossed, but I should have a juicy little project on the side coming up. I’m considering using Padrino for it as I love the idea of a Ruby take on Django, sitting somewhere between the lightness of Sinatra and the all encompassingness of Rails and complete with the built in admin side. This would seem like a good opportunity to try to turn some of these notions into reality.

Hopefully putting all that out in public will be an incentive to crack on.