So… I found myself googling how to use delayed_job without Rails, in a plain Ruby application. There’s lots of posts talking about how complicated it is and how “if it’s meant for Ralis, don’t bother trying to break it out.” But all it took was two small changes to make it happen (since you can’t use the Rails generators).

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Awesome video by Alec Brownstein on Tweetforger…

Just launched another fun project called What Color is Twitter? Predictably, you can find it at: http://www.whatcoloristwitter.com. Here’s a widget you can embed if you want to know every 10 minutes what color Twitter is.

On April 1st, two friends and I launched a humorous art project called TweetForger. It lives at www.tweetforger.com. The idea came about when we were discussing the immense stock that people place in 140 characters. People use the medium to discuss their lunch, and yet the same platform starts revolutions and ends careers. There has been a proliferation of clients, platforms and ways to interact with Tweets, and we were very interested in how people consume that information.

Most important to me was the work behind the scenes. It has been a serious technical challenge to build something this quickly (~60 hours) that could scale well and retain its lightweight structure. It’s a validation of the technical skills I’ve been trying to develop but, even more, it’s the satisfaction of seeing a fun project come together in a few weeks and actually make people laugh.

OMG. What an awesome tool. I just discovered Twilio and I am totally addicted… I mean, I had heard about how easy and powerful the tool is, but wow. The community is intensely helpful, and the documentation makes it easy to follow along and create powerful voice & sms interactivity for your applications.

Case in point: long distance for my parents.

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I’ve been playing around with a lot of the static, boring features I built in the original version of Brio Limoand trying to upgrade and improve as many as I can. There is so much kick ass stuff you can do with Rails and by leveraging the prolific community around it.

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I’ve never been great at learning a new skill in the abstract. This is especially true for programming and design, as I find that undertaking a concrete task helps crystallize my thinking and brings issues forward that I would have trouble identifying in a vacuum. Perhaps this is why I moved so easily through Rails Tutorial, as there is a specified project, and Michael presents many real-world examples throughout.

Once I finished this tutorial, I decided to make something on my own. The first of these is a full-featured internal reservation system for my friend’s limo company in Aspen. Hopefully I get a few free trips out of it, but the satisfaction of building something people use is really the best part.

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I’m a newbie, but I don’t get why the Rails framework changes so much with each minor version, and entirely with the jump to 3.0. Things I was learning before and systems that worked fine have all fallen apart. I’ve had to toss any 2.x books I had invested in and entirely re-work what I was developing. Starting from scratch after not finishing anything is tough. Maybe that speaks to the quality of the programmer…

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Way back when getting a good website up and running involved only HTML and the occasional piece of JavaScript, I was pretty awesome. I knew HTML inside and out, I could code data-driven applications in ASP with SQLServer, my Flash sites kicked ass and I was getting paid $10,000 per site. Pretty great when you’re 19 and doing it part time. My how things change.

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