jtmitchum.com

Working nights comes with a laundry list of side-effects on life. Working in sleep can highlight a few of those in rather irritating ways.

Nothing better than someone snoring to remind you what everyone else on the planet is doing and you are not. That didn’t used to bother me as much before I became a father-to-be. Now I want to be home much more often, especially during the night.

But, night work has its upshots as well. In sleep, you can end up with a great deal of spare time on your hands. I’ve used that time for many a things. Some noble, some plain childish.

I’ve taken those little spiked thumb condoms sorters use to file through paperwork better and made tiny footballs out of them, which I then used to hold kicking competitions for distance in hospital hallways. I’ve also watched entirely too many movies.

On the more intelligent side, I’ve read countless pages of material covering physics, philosophy, history and science. I’ve listened to numerous pod-cast news stories and shows that tell me what the daylight world does with its time in all its glory. Apparently, day-timers spend a lot of time murdering, eating and running into financial troubles of some sort.

What’s become the newest application of that time is learning programming. I’ve always been a tech nerd of sorts and back in my middle school days I was busy hacking about autoexec and config files on DOS systems. Dad was a bit of a nerd with me as we both went to pick up a math co-processor back when they were separate chips from the cpu.

I always considered programming a secluded non-social activity that involved extreme math and esoteric interest that only a bug collector could identify with. Last summer, while working on KUJH-TV’s web site, I worked hand in hand with programmers.

They were people, with senses of humor and occasionally normal interests (albeit, on the thin edge of normal interest). One of them talked to me about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. The system we built for the school was in PHP and he begged to do the new system with Ruby on Rails. He boasted he could finish it in a weekend if we went with that framework and I was baffled at the claim.

He never convinced the project leader to go for it, but we talked about it at length for the rest of the summer. When I read ruby code, I could actually understand bits of it wit very little explanation. It was this feel that started a glimmer of interest in me.

Since that summer, I’ve realized several things about my abilities with coding and languages. From tinkering with Photoshop for hours on end, I realize I’m not an artistic designer type. From working on the project, I realize I can identify functional ways a program should work so that the person who actually has to use it doesn’t need to understand exactly what they are doing.

I started finding all the free online material on Ruby and Rails I could and started to feel some promise in the language.

Last night, I attended a Ruby user group meeting in the Kansas City area. The small group of 4 who did show up were welcoming and informative. A few of them are authoring books on the language as we speak.

Jason Clinton is working on a Ruby pocket book guide and Shashank Date is editing for an author on a new Ruby book as well. I understand that a few others are authors on material as well. I feel like I’ve stumbled on a group of really knowledgeable people on the topic.

While we didn’t cover much of the language last night, I did glean a sensation that was promising. These weren’t elitists who felt they needed to protect a sacred tomb of information. They weren’t condescending or overbearing with their accomplishments and shared ideas freely.

My journalistic mentality likes this open information. It wreaks of freedom of speech, the open sharing of ideas and information. It’s in a marketplace of ideas that the very best ways eventually rise to the top.

Hopefully, I’ll be building my own blog program as an exercise. Expect an ugly looking site in the near future with some descriptions of how I did it. Of course, there is a pressured goal to become fluent enough to work on profitable projects. To distill that down, I want to get paid at some point in time for this kind of knowledge.

Amidst the posts about babies and political rants and family life and trips, now a bit of my blog will start to delve into coding in hopes of sharing a new hobby with anyone who cares to read.

Don’t freak out when you first see some code. In fact, take some time to read it. You might be as shocked as I was when some of it is actually readable in english. That doesn’t hold up for all things, but it does for quite a large array of them. (Array.. that’s a programming reference… booo.. bad pun.)