This morning I followed a link from Smashing Magazine Twitter feed to an article by Nate Westheimer titled “The HoPE Manifesto: How I Taught Myself to Code“. The blog post chronicles his journey from some one who didn’t code, to be able to get enough experience with Ruby on Rails to start building prototype applications to test out new ideas.
I found this blog post to be pretty inspirational and motivating. I have friends and peers in the IT field that are programmers. Either they do it as their 9-5 gig, freelance business, or as a hobby. I think it’s pretty amazing being able to write software and I’ve always had an itch to do it as well. But I always fall into the same traps:
- I can’t stay committed to a single language/technology. I’ve bounced around from learning Perl (my best one), Python, PHP, Java, C#, Mono, and C++. Unfortunately I never got really good at one language.
- I can neither come up with a good idea that has already been done before or I have an idea that is way too ambitious and I fall flat on my face.
- Real Life
I am hoping to give learning another crack here shortly. In the blog article Nathan talks about use Rails as his platform of choice. I might go down that route as well because I always had an interest in building web applications. I am also have an idea or two for a project I would like to work on and now would be a good time to dive in. The only thing I am not sure I can do with my current obligations is do a full on 5 day immersion or Sweat Lodge. I might have to do s scaled down version of that with my vacation coming up. I do not think my wife would appreciate it too much if I was to spend my entire vacation glued to my computer.