Ruby for Rails Book

by Scott on July 17, 2006

Ruby for Rails is a must have for Ruby on Rails developers.

While you could develop Rails applications without understanding Ruby, to do would completely miss out on the reasons Rails was created in Ruby. Ruby is a powerful and enjoyable language.

For those of you that do not know of David Black, here is a part of the bio from his book: “A Ruby community leader, David Black is the director of Ruby Central, the parent organization of the annual International Ruby Conference (RubyConf) and the International Rails Conference. David is a Ruby core contributor and the creator and maintainer of RCRchive.”

The reasons that I think you must know Ruby to become an effective and efficient Rails programming machine:

1. To understand the Rails source code

2. To make your Rails apps do something beyond pushing data in and out of a database.

3. To take advantage of “Ruby everywhere”

4. To use Ruby for non-Rails tasks (automation).

5. To enjoy developing Rails apps!

Posted in Programming

Why You Should Have a Non-Technical Business Partner

by Scott on July 10, 2006

If you are a micro-ISV, you should have a non-technical business partner.

Accountability, Motivation and Focus are certainly over-used words, yet are also hurdles that most likely trip up most technical minded programmers turned business owners. Those with the interest and technical aptitude to design and develop programs will find the design and development tasks easy.

To turn the product created from those efforts into a viable business takes a level of accountability, focus, and motivation that is not expected of the typical programmer in the corporate world.

Posted in Productivity

About the title

by Scott on June 28, 2006

For those asking about the blog’s title; “Now, Do It” has subtle differences from “Do It Now” (Steve Pavlina) and “Just Do It” (Nike). “Now, Do It” is personal for me because I have studied and been active in business and technology for over 15 years. I have four years of undergraduate business and computer science study and five years of part-time graduate business and computer science study behind me (I expect to complete my masters this fall). I have been a developer, team lead, and Sr. Manager on projects big (over $4 million) and small (get it done in a week). I have all the experience, training, tools, support, and desire to create this new software company. The only thing left now is to do it.

How to Avoid Distraction

by Scott on June 27, 2006

To avoid distraction – schedule it. To avoid being distracted by something during your workday, make the distraction itself a task to be completed that day. Do this regularly and your mind will stay “on task” because you know there will be time later to spend on whatever is distracting you.

For me, the major distraction is web browsing. With the wild world web at our fingertips, it is too easy to get distracted by an interesting tidbit that you find when looking up what version of mySQL is currently recommended by and for the RoR crowd. Browsing is not bad – in fact you need to feed your intelligence and creativity and most of the links that spawn from your initial source of needed information provide a good diet of technical, creative, humorous, and business information. What is bad is the loss of productivity that results from the urge to continue to follow links of interest. It is not that browsing is junk food. The problem is that when you are trying to complete a task is not the time to eat any type of “food”.

Before you stop reading and write this off as the former Fortune 25 manager in me talking like a productivity zealot let me clarify that this is not a managers’ call to “stop goofing off and work harder”. This is relevant to you for two reasons.

Posted in Productivity

Why Write and Why Write Here?

by Scott on June 27, 2006

Family and friends continue to ask what we are up to and we find it difficult to explain. We expect to work more hours than ever before yet also expect to enjoy more time to do what we want. We expect to produce quality software yet also expect to do so more quickly than at companies with many more employees. We are providing web-based products yet are not maintaining any equipment (except my MacBook Pro laptop). We are selling product yet have no physical store or sales force.

These apparent contradictions make it difficult to provide a simple answer the ‘what are we up to’ question. Because there is no simple answer, and because folks seek slightly different angles, I am posting my experiences here for those that are interested. I write for other reasons as well.