So, it's been a looooooong time since I did any personal dev stuff. I used to spend a lot of time on web apps, making my own blogs and music database systems and the like. Somewhere down the line I just kind of...completely lost interest in maintaining any of it, let alone making new stuff.

So I dropped it all.

I do C# programming for my job. Yesterday, I did a search for something relating to the #region construct, which Visual Studio uses for code-folding organization. I found this article where an emphatic programmer slammed their use and essentially publicly shamed people for using them. His is an extreme position and an extreme headline, both which garner attention (it got mine).

Deep within the myriad web tutorials, eBooks, and tinkering/spelunking of others' projects on and with Ruby and Rails that I've penetrated with my curiosity comes an official announcement: I've embarked on my first, really real Ruby on Rails project.

Over the course of my history of computer programming (which stretches from the simplest markup language to full-on compiled languages), I've tried out a lot of things. When my family got its first personal computer, an AST rocking a 100MHz Pentium 1 processor and Windows 3.1 (MPC level 2, baby!), it came with QBASIC alongside its foundational copy of DOS 6. I remember playing Gorillas on it, later marveling at the source code, not really understanding how it all worked.

You know it when you see it: bad code. It's not necessarily code that doesn't work (but it often is). Bad code is hard to parse, has needless complexity, and doesn't take advantage of the language's constructs for making your code easy to follow, edit, augment, and fix. We all have probably been guilty of producing bad code, either through ignorance or laziness. However, it's always something that should be avoided, if possible.

As evidenced by the subject, I'm on Github.

I recently completed (more or less) the Git Immersion tutorial by Jim Weirich, which walks you through the basics and intermediates of Git, the popular version control system.

Redmine is a great project management web application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. I've been using it to help myself organize all of the many coding (and recently music) projects I work on.

While I have one main, official musical collaboration under my belt (that of Pure Yellow Colour), I have met up with other musicians many times to do what we improvisers like to call "jamming". Break out some instruments and start playing. Sometimes there's a plan or some notes or words, but often it's just one person starting to play something while the others try to join in. It's a dance between a group of musicians that I can actually perform.

Despite being first introduced to Ruby via working on More Things Need To, I haven't really gone full-on into Ruby-learning mode until now. I believe I've made some small inroads toward getting to know it better in the past few days, though.