Before-Coffee Status Report

[chipotle]

In no particular order:

• I’m doing subcontracting work as an editor/proofer for a little bit. Good: the hourly rate is nothing to sneeze at. Bad: I’m unlikely to see any of that money before August. Ugly: cleaning up Microsoft Word documents with complex formatting is nearly always an ordeal.

• Merely having a throwaway “studying Ruby on Rails” line on my résumé caused someone to ask me if I could apply for a “Senior Ruby on Rails” developer position. Hmm.

• If a contracting company I talked to this week gets awarded a specific government contract, I may be brought on as a web guy. All very “outlook hazy, ask again later” at this point, but it’s a good thought.

• Speaking of Ruby on Rails, I’m still plodding through Agile Web Development with Rails, the second edition. I wasn’t kidding, I really am studying it. Maybe eventually I’ll have a project to go along with it. I’m thinking of writing a weblog engine because, you know, there’s just not enough of those out there. (Well, okay, I’m thinking of it because I don’t like most of the weblog engines out there.)

And on a more general level: no, I still don’t know what to do with my life. That’s too much to ask for in a week, I guess; I’m finding I can’t just say, “It’s time for hard decisions, so I’m going to take $tough_road now.” I suppose I’m mostly just hoping to stay stable enough to keep chewing on it for a while, rather than having my direction forced on me again.

Comments

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

A weblog engine is the canonical first Ruby on Rails project.

The market for Rails developers is RED SCREAMING HOT right now, it is very hard to find knowledgable rails devs, my strongest advice to you is learn it well asap.

RailsConf's message board (like the one at anthrocon) was chock full of startups looking for devs, offering paid vacation/benefits/the works. It was like 1998 all over again.

LEARN RAILS NOW and be senior in a year when things shake out and the real muppets arrive on the scene looking for work.

[tilton.livejournal.com]

All joking aside, actually the world could use a decent Rails weblog engine. Typo is OK, but it's falling behind terribly, it's hard to install, it's lacking features, and it's only single-user. I'm all hot and bothered for Rails, but I abandoned Typo for WordPress just because it ended up being more mature and fuller-featured. So, it's worth a shot :)

Good luck! These inflection points in life always seem daunting, but the challenge often leads to the greatest success.