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

Welcome to the new site!

It’s been a long time since I blogged over at my first site grid7.org and I found it about time that I started doing it again. This time I wanted to have a certain amount of focus with this site then I did with the previous one and I thought the name was pretty damn cool.

The first thing I would like to focus the new site on is I want to write about my attempt to start creating and selling themes for Envato’s Themeforest. One of the things I have always been interested in for awhile now is building pretty kickass websites. However due to work, school and life in general I have never had the chance or the motivation to really sharpen those skills. I am hoping by getting a theme approved on the marketplace and start getting some extra income through it, it will give me the motivation I need to create even more themes.

As you can see the site now is a pretty bare bones Thematic theme for WordPress. By going through and getting better at web design and WordPress customization I can evolve the look of the site and reflect the hard work I am putting into it. While I am working on the site, I will write about the different steps I am taking and what my thought process was for doing something the way I did it. Think of this as a giant case study.

The next thing I would like to focus on to try and rekindle my love for sketching/cartooning. Up until the end of high-school I used to be a pretty prolific drawer and I used to fill sketchbooks and class notebooks all the time. I had aspirations of going to art school and landing up at some place like Industrial Light and Magic being a concept artist, but I couldn’t afford it and ended up getting into my second love….computers. One of the things that is starting to motivate me to draw again is seeing a ton of concept artists posting their sketch books online to see and inspiring people like me to get drawing again. I hope by doing the same I could somehow pay it forward by getting other’s inspired to get drawing or to stick with it.

Because I have a pretty insane schedule my writing will not be as numerous as I hope it to be, however I will try and crank out at least one post per week minimum.