TMI – Thoughts, Musings, and Inspiration

I am sitting here in Denver, CO on the night before the much-anticipated Develop With Passion (formerly Nothing but .NET) course hosted by JP Boodhoo.

I’m very thrilled at the opportunity to learn, but at the same time a bit intimidated by the amount of information I’m about to consume. I need an efficient way to manage the influx.

In an attempt to not get overwhelmed, here is what I hope to get out of the course this week:

1. Learn
2. Network
3. Have fun!

I will try to document my experience and key points as much as I can. Stay tuned. I’m very excited!

Just when I decide to start blogging again, we go ahead and cancel our NerdNights…for tonight only. I decided to use the extra time to improve my RoR knowledge. The following resources have been really helpful over the past week:

• Try Ruby

• Rails for Zombies

• Learning Rails Podcast

Although I’m not using it at work, learning RoR on the side is definitely expanding my mind, which affects my attitude at work. I look forward to challenging problems and always new opportunities to learn.

So, today our task was to create a fully-functional user authentication portion of a RoR website. The end result would have New User registration, site membership (complete with password authentication). This was quite comfortably done within the span of 90 minutes. How, you ask? Well, this was all possible due to the ultra-smart ruby gem devise.

Tracing back to what we did this evening, we started from scratch, with installing RoR. Then we deleted the default index.html file residing in the public folder of the application. Once this was done, we created the action for the Home view inside the home controller file. Since this is all using the default model, we only needed to change the controller and the view files. The next step was to gem install the devise gem, and have that piece take care of our membership. It was really really cool how the features unveiled themselves right out of the box.

I just wanted to drop in to say how cool it’s been learning this Rails thing…

I have to mention, off-topic, that I thought this was pretty cool to learn of at NerdNight: Brain Rules.

So, since the year started (I know, it’s April) I’ve been on this ever growing quest to make the most and do the most. I broke out the year by quarter and set my goals that way, categorized into career, fitness, and social life.

Well, one of the things that has come out of my goals is Nerd Nights, which is where I get together with some of my friends and either talk shop or work on a development project. In the first quarter, project Winter Harvest, we worked on a project-crawling tool in .NET that would read the files within a folder and harvest out the meta data elements to provide information about which databases, tables, and connection strings were used to tie the application together. This was a really cool experience because I got exposure to git, StructureMap, and got to program in C#.

In this (second) quarter, we will learning Ruby on Rails. While we’re still getting up to speed on the Ruby language and Rails framework, I’m really excited about the opportunity to put my skills to use outside of work. This promises to be solid experience being built on the side, and hopefully I will have creative solutions for the bank after that.

Also, on the frequency of my postings, I hope to be able to come back here after our weekly meetings to post some thoughts on what I learned. So, hopefully I’ll be able to post more frequently that way. Stay tuned…

I found that quote somewhere (or did I paraphrase it from something else?), and I really like it. It comes in particularly useful as I think about my recent attendance in Yoga class…I am learning more about my body, my limits, and my mind. I think the instructors are catching on to my enthusiasm as well, I was told to stay back after class today so I could improve some of my weaker moves – the eagle pose, the standing tree pose, and the standing head-to-knee pose. I look forward to becoming better at these poses. With time…and persistent practice.

I tried Bikram Yoga today and I think I’m hooked!

That was my Facebook status update after getting out of a very rejuvenating session of Yoga. I think I will be doing this more often. I feel tired, but also feel younger…I am very curious to discover the hidden wonders of this ancient practice, and really reap what everyone seems to be raving about…I can’t wait to go back tomorrow!

On a completely unrelated note, I found a blog that I want to explore more of, given my fledgling relationship with a lovely young lady: http://whathappycouplesdo.blogspot.com/

As I appear to be on the verge of entering a relationship, I am reminded of what one of my favorite people said to me about the topic:

A relationship is like a table built with four pillars – Finances, Beliefs, Physical Intimacy, and Communication – if any one of those breaks down, then the relationship is unstable…

I always thought that was profound.

I just saw a Mos Def interview where he was asked, after a performance at the Austin City Limits festival, about inspiration. I absolutely loved his response:

To quote my good friend Malik Sayeed, he said ‘Inspiration is for amateurs’… to quote Octavia Butler, she said: ‘Habit is more reliable than talent.”

I went to the St. Louis Day of .NET this year, the second event I have attended this year that brought together thought leaders in the Microsoft world, and the .NET space in general. As usual, it was really cool to have people talk about interesting topics ranging from Pragmatic Software Architecture, Building & Creating a High-Performance Team, to Adventures in System.Diagnostics and WCF 4.

I haven’t blogged in a while…mainly because I internalize a lot of what goes on, and I have been studying the for the MCTS exam …Whatever the excuse, I have been feeling particularly nostalgic lately, mainly because we’ve passed the midpoint of the year, and I am assessing my goals…I still need to kick it up a notch, even though I have learned a ton.

I continue to work on my professionalism and perception in the workplace. I have a what I will refer to as quiet confidence, and I am finding out that does not bode well in the workplace. People need to know me…meaning I need to be more outspoken…that is all…venting complete. For now.