The Opinionated Programmer

So, I have been back from my trip for a few days now, and I have a lot of interesting stories and the such because of it. So, I mentioned that I was out of the country, but the specifics are that I was in Buenos Aires, Argentina for about a week, and I was in Uruguay for one day as well. I was there with my all mens choir The Singing Statesmen from the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire.

The city of Buenos Aires is a great place. Our hotel was located in one of the best parts of town. We were about a block away from this huge obelisk that is the centre of most of the celebrations that happen in the city. This was especially nice during new years eve. We got to celebrate new years eve on a balcony of the hotel where we could see this obelisk. When midnight hit, we all went down to the obelisk and sang by it. This was a great time and one of the locals recorded our singing and we found it on youtube when we got back.

Besides the place we got to stay, we also got to sing in quite a few unique environments. The first was in la Catedral de la Plata in la Plata just outside of Buenos Aires. This was a very interesting place to sing because the ceiling was so tall that we had about a 3 second delay from when we would sing to when the sound would get back to us.

Overall, it was a very great trip and an experience of a life time. I am back at work now, and have been working on a few interesting things lately. I got to work with my first mailer for an application this week. All I have to say is that making a mailer with Ruby on Rails is a lot easier than I would have expected a mailer to be. All it really is, is you design the mail as an html document, and just use that as the body of you email which is extremely easy. Then, writing the code to call the mailer is very simple as well. In the future, when I hear I need to make a mailer, I will not worry about it because it is quite easy.

My next interesting thing that I get to work with that I haven’t used before is exporting data from an application to an Excel spreadsheet. From looking at what I have to do, this looks like it will be easier than I thought as well. Lately, it seems to be a trend with Ruby on Rails that I always over exaggerate how hard something will be, and it almost always ends up being easier that I would have expected. I think that is mainly due to the language, but I would assume that part of it has to do with my newer ability to trust myself while coding now. That has been one of my flaws for a while. Lately however, I have found that if I am confident and ask for help when I am stuck on something everything works out better for all parties involved. I am glad that I finally started to learn this and get over my timid approach to coding that I used to have.

As of late, school has been taking over my life. I have had assignment, after assignment due back to back so I have had little time to do much about it. I have been able to learn a bit about things I didn’t know however. The main class that I have been doing a lot of work in, is Operating Systems. I have been learning a ot of low level ideas along with programming some of them in this class. It is a bit more difficult than I expected, but I am learning a lot.

Otherwise, I am working on preparing for my concert on Friday. I have one song yet that I need to perfect my memorization of, but other than that, I think things will go well. After that, I will be touring next Wednesday through Friday with the same choir around to different high schools in Wisconsin which will be a blast also.

With work, I have been working on a new project while finishing up details with the previous one I have been working on that is almost done. Having the experiance of starting a project from scratch, being allowed to make it my own has been really rewarding for me. Anyway, I need to get going, as I have a lot of stuff to finish up today before the day it done, and there are only so many hours left.

Tonight, we have a Ruby user group meeting here in Eau Claire. It is a pretty big meeting, as we are trying to get a lot of people there to show them first, what a user group does, and second, the awesomeness of Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Due to this meeting, we are having a few quick speakers, and then lighting talks by other members. I am giving one of these lighting talks.

As of right now, 10ish AM, I still have to decide what I want to talk about. This isn’t due to the fact that I am a slacker, or lazy, this is due to the fact that I have a bunch of things that I want to talk about, and I need to narrow it down. At first, I wanted to show people how quick and easy it is to get a simple project up and running. I don’t think I am going to do this because it has been shown a few times in talks in classes to some of the possible new members. Next, it was suggested that I do a talk about HAML because as you have seen, I have taken a pretty solid look at it. I don’t think I am going to do this because there are so many new people that might be coming to the meeting this evening. So, I think I am going to just talk about what I like about ruby, what I do with it on a daily basis, and why I enjoy using it so much. I think this is a good topic because this way, I can still show enthusiasm while not feel like I am either talking down, or over, someones head. This way I can just talk to them, and explain my experiences with it instead of trying to teach, which can be done at a meeting later, when we know who is interested in what topics.

Greeting everyone. I would like to tell all of you a little bit about myself, and what this blog is about. For a while, I have been wanting to set up a blog, and now I finally got around to it.

First off, my name is Gary Crabtree, and I am currently a 22 year old college student at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. I am a computer science - software engineering major, and a psychology minor. This is the first place I ever learned any type of programming, and it all started with Java for me (hence the terribly tacky title). I have had a small taste of many languages, and design patterns, and that conglomerate of things that a computer science department will teach, but the most significant thing that has had an influence for me, did not actually come from class itself.

At first, I was slightly turned off to programming as it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be at all. Having never touched any code, with the exception of simple HTML, before college, going straight into the computer science department was a significant life choice for me. I had been good at the arts side of things. I was in choir, band, and theater, both musical and non musical, but I felt that why I enjoyed those things was because they were an escape for me from the “real world”. If I was going to go into any of those as a career, I think it would have lost its meaning to me. So, I figured I will always be able to find community theater, and choirs/bands wherever I go, and I decided to keep it a significant part of my life, but to pursue other endeavors.

I swayed my other options, and they came down to computer science, and psychology. So, I decided to go with computer science as a main focus as I felt that it would give me the best variety of options in careers after a degree with it. So, I proceeded to take classes at the university, homework outside of classes, and spending the rest of my time leisurely for a few years until one day, things changed.

I got a job for the university doing web development. I had done a bit of HTML as mentioned, and some simple things from classes as well, so I figured it would be a great way to earn some money as I was in need of some greatly. So, in the summer of 2007, I started said job doing simple static design work.  By the end of the summer however, I had started expressing interest in learning the application side of web design as well, and I proceeded to let me bosses know that if possible, I would like to move in that direction. So, towards the end of that summer, I started training in something that would greatly influence the rest of my college career, and undoubtedly, my life. What I speak of, is Ruby on Rails.

Once I started it, I didn’t understand why everyone advocated so strongly for it; it took me a good chunk of time before I would either. I didn’t get to fully do Rails work until almost that following summer due to other static projects that came up, and then I got to take another look at it. This time, I started to slowly see what was cool about it after a year of working with languages such as C/C++, Scheme, and Prolog in my classes. Slowly, over this previous year, I have gotten to spend a lot more time working with it, and it is leading me to stay with it in the future. Although I still have a lot to learn about it, I plan to continue working with it professionally when out of school as well.

I feel that I have gotten to tell you all about my story, and where I am coming from as well. This blog will be where I will talk about what I learn both with Rails, and other technologies either through school, work, or anywhere else.