There is a delight in working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. – The Mythical Man-Month

I’ve been reading quite a lot more lately, the above quote being one I just started tonight. Good break when you’ve hit a snag in a project and need to clear your head a little. Development on personal projects is going pretty well too. The most annoying part though is that I’m trying to do things the right way in a language I’ve never used before; which makes development agonizingly slow at times. Lots of time reading the documentation and googling for examples, let me tell you. But when it works it’s a great feeling. Database design is complete for phase 1, which will not include anywhere near all the features I have planned, but enough to build off. Not really putting a timeframe on the project as whole, just as long as I keep working on it I’m content. Eventually I’ll snap a picture of my sticky-note/whiteboard of the sitemap/structure; once I get a new camera. :p This thursday there’s a Ruby On Rails meeting at the Orlando Java Users Group all of us at work are going to check out too, so looking forward to that boosting my motivation a notch or two.

Hopefully DDRei and everything else will be back up and running shortly. I can’t believe my host vanished yet again — I really need to stop picking these fly-by-night hosts. It was good while it lasted at least. I just signed up over at Dreamhost which looks promising. They have rails and SVN support which is what i’m most interested in. I’ll lose CF/ASP/MSSQL which means Arcadefly will probably go down for now (not that it was finished in the first place). The JS is the biggest part of it, so no big loss there; the CF side just translates the mssql to xml anyway.

Looking at all my domains I really wonder what I was thinking registering some of these. I have so many ideas for sites, but really no drive to work on them. It really comes down to how I plan things I think. As a developer I think more of the information and the database design than what the user will see. This makes a good site structure design and planning, but no real practical implementation without putting in the time and effort. I don’t find the site design fun, so I usually get stuck up on that. Either way, I’m doing both now; just have to stay on it.

On that note, I realized how many completely unused, somewhat useless domains I have. If anyone can name all 13 of my domains I’ll buy you dinner (one for free: dyogenez.com, because I just registered it).