Wow, it’s been so long since I last posted that I actually had troubles remembering my WordPress password. To the whole whopping two of you that might stumble across this blog and have actually read this far, I apologize for the rambling nature of this post.
The past few months have been odd, with an unexpected and unwelcome trip to the ER, multiple follow-ups with the doctor, one of the most insane project schedules I’ve ever seen, and the most…annoying…launch that I’ve had the displeasure to experience. Thankfully, my part of the launch seems to have gone fairly well. The schedule was so insane that the code-base isn’t quite where I wanted it to be at this point, but it’s functional and gets most of the job done. It’s a long way from being usable by customers, but at least it has some use internally. And it’s given me a chance to exercise some skills that haven’t had a workout in a while, like database design.
One thing I’d like to do when things calm down a bit is try my hand at iPhone development again. I actually worked my way through Beginning iPhone Development earlier this year and enjoyed the hell out of it, but I ran into two blocks. The first one was my inability to actually think of an interesting project to work on, and the second was finding time to actually work on a project. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll just work on something that interests me and not worry so much about it being useful. Maybe I’ll surprise myself and come up with something neat.
Another thing I’d like to try out again is Erlang. I started working my way through Programming Erlang after reading the entire book and was thinking that it might be useful for an upcoming project at work, but that pretty much got laughed off by co-workers. I still think it could have been useful and may have actually made some of the concurrency issues in the app I’m working on now a little easier and efficient to deal with, but it wasn’t my call to make. The IT department probably wouldn’t allow an app written in Erlang to run on their machines anyway.
Hmm, maybe I’ll figure out a project where I can do some iPhone development and mix in some Erlang on the backend. It would be an itch-scratcher project, so I think that picking the project based on the languages instead of vice-versa would be excusable.
