brain farts

When I started blogging, I promised myself I would never blog about computer programming. I didn’t want to come off like the total dork that I was, and I just figured no one would give a shit. But lately there are 2 large issues looming in my professional career that I just can’t continue to ignore.

1. I haven’t really tried anything new in a long time. I haven’t learned anything through experimentation or discovery in so long. I feel like my skills are becoming obsolete as the technology around me evolves.

2. There are some amazing trends in programming architecture happening that if I choose to ignore them, I’ll be left in the dust.

Specifically, I keep running into this MVC (Model View Controller) paradigm that I know nothing about. I’ve seen it in Cocoa for the Mac, Ruby on Rails, and a bunch of other places that seem to be cutting edge and the future of programming. Ruby on Rails struck me as interesting since a big part of the Web development that I do is mundane, repetitive and menial. I really do a lot of copy and paste, and duplicating of code. Ruby on Rails has been getting a lot of attention lately too. So much attention, that there is a bunch of clones for different web languages.
Theres:
Ruby on Rails
PHP on TRAX
ColdFusion on Wheels
and another PHP framework called
Symfony,
and a bunch of others.
I don’t know of something for ASP, but I’m sure it’s out there or on its way.

Symfony and PHP on TRAX caught my attention since they run on top of the rather ubiquitous and free PHP language. At first glance and from what I understand, Symfony seems more mature and extensible.

So I should learn Symfony right?
HELL NO! I’m too damn lazy to struggle with this shit myself without good documentation, and besides with work, who has time. I’ve also never felt that learning something for the sake of learning was practical. If only I was getting to paid to work on a project using Symfony and there was a great book to reference I would do it.

OK, enough dramatic effect.
My coworker Jon Bauer turned me on to this 24 day tutorial called askeet!. Jon says he starting doing the tutorial, and he’s blown away by it. He hasn’t finished, but what he’s learned from the first 2 weeks worth of lessons has been enough for him to start developing an application using Symfony. I think I’ll helping him on this project in the near future as part of my job.

No reason for me not to try it out now. I get a great tutorial. It’s part of my job. I have a partner to learn with and bounce ideas off of.

This diary will be of my experiences in building the askeet! application, but because I’m stubborn, I’m going to do it a bit differently. I’m going to do it all on Mac.

I’m running Mac OS X 10.4.3, and I haven’t installed anything other the the base system. Here’s my story.