The other evening I spent some time by myself thinking about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness. Well, at least the life part of that… and maybe a bit of the happiness part.
At any rate.
I started thinking about what all has been going on in the past few months in my life. The job search. The bit of vacation. Some opportunities that looked really good and fell through… some opportunities that didn’t look quite as good but worked out.
And that I think is it. Life.
Now… for the rest of the story. What I’ve been working on recently.
Still Riding Some Rails
maze_attempts_app
For those of you who are worried that I may have given up on programming and just decided to become a full time farmer, rest assured that that is not the case. In fact I recently wrote a little application to allow us to keep track of peoples or groups times as they go through our corn maze this fall.
Sadly no one has used it yet… everyone I offer to time says something along these lines “I think we can time ourselves…”
Ok… at least I built something that might could have possibly been useful!
Also on the Rails front I recently spent a little while experimenting with combining a Unicorn web server on Heroku with monitoring by New Relic to provide a fairly decent site response time on a number of Rails apps hosted on Heroku… That was kind of cool…
wordpress_themes
Learning to Build WP Themes
I’ve also been doing a bit of WordPress work again. Although my current status as a WordPress guy is something along the lines of what some in the community have called an “implementer” I continue to try to push the boundaries of what I know and learn new things.
One of the biggest things I’m currently working on in my WordPress world is learning to scratch code WordPress themes. For as long as I’ve been working with WordPress I would look for a theme that was close to what I wanted and then modify the php files and css to get to where I wanted to go. That works, and is part of what makes WordPress so powerful, but it isn’t quite the same as going from the drawing board to the web page by creating my own php template files.
Being able to scratch build my own themes will let me be able to do exactly what I want to with the websites I build using WordPress, instead of relying on something that someone else has built that is intentionally built to broadly fill a lot of peoples needs.
Will it Stick?
In a lot of ways I’m in “throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks” mode.
Where all this will end up. I guess I don’t know. Time has a way of telling those kinds of things…