A couple of weeks ago I met with Garrick VanBuren to talk about cullect.com. I came away from the lunch excited about two things: Trying out some of the features in cullect that I hadn’t quite understood before and giving Ruby on Rails another shot.
I went to lunch with Garrick to offer him some feedback about why I hadn’t adopted cullect yet. (I’ve had an account for about 7 months.) A few colleagues were raving about it. I knew I had to be missing something. I was.
While I think cullect has a way to go before widespread adoption (it runs a little slow on my PowerBook), I see what everyone else likes about it and more importantly, I see lots of potential. So, nice work Garrick. I drank the Kool-Aid. I now curate a small batch of feeds about music and “recommend” posts so the best rise to the top in my “Important” list. This way I can also repurpose those same articles to Minneapoliscast. In other words, I can repurpose content so that relevant reading is included with what I publish. It’s fun and it’s cool.
I’m not even going to talk about how you can pay cullect so that part of your monthly subscription goes to publishers you read. I can’t even tell you how cool I think that is.
What I really wanted to write about is how I came away from our conversation inspired to try Ruby on Rails. I’ve been toying with RoR for about a year now. As I started working my way through Agile Web Development on Rails last year, the realization gradually dawned on me that I was going to have to sit down and learn Ruby. So I bought a pdf version of Programming Ruby, but I didn’t really get very far before other duties called. I just didn’t have time to learn a new language.
After talking with Garrick I was determined to give it another shot. Then I thought, there has to be a Rails-like set of tools for PHP–a language I’ve been working in for years. That thought and a quick Google search led me to CakePHP.
Two weeks later and I’m near completion of the first module to manage clinic and lab data here at work. Once I got my head wrapped around MVC and the built-in helpers in CakePHP, the development got faster and faster. (Disclosure: The database was already fully envisioned and built beforehand. An important first step.) I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to quickly code something in a few lines, test it and have it work. I have a whole summer of coding ahead of me. I’m very excited to deploy this application by fall.
On a final note, I was feeling a little cocky, so I coded my first Wordpress plugin yesterday too. Again, easy. It’s not quite ready for public release yet but with a little tweaking, I might just release it. Basically it just pulls in PodPress data and lists the ten most popular podcasts on Minneapoliscast.
I was a little worried that with our research slowing down over the summer I was going to be bored. Now I’m really looking forward to the coming months. Fun stuff.
