That Puerto Rican Rubyist

The past two weeks I’ve been totally separated from all of my learning and reading processes I’ve established to myself, and I felt terrible for doing that. It’s not like I’ve been totally disconnected from everything. I’ve still read all my favorite programming-related blogs, as usual. Still, I haven’t just sat down to absorb everything or practice.

These past two days I decided to get back on track. However, I found myself with the same problem I’ve had for a while now. Whenever I sit down to learn something, I want to learn everything. I don’t mean “learn everything of something“. It’s more like “learn something from everything“.

For the past months, I’ve had a hundred different interests. I’m interested in learning Adobe AIR. Microsoft Silverlight sounds like something I could use in the future. I was sold on Test-Driven Development and ever started to adopt its practices to my daily usage, yet recently I’m liking the sound of Behavior-Driven Development more and more and would like to test that road. I want to learn other web frameworks in different programming languages, like Django and CakePHP. And of course, I’m still totally into Ruby and Rails.

I know a lot of people who don’t mind knowing about everything. But the deal is that by learning (or having the desire to learn) about so many things, you don’t fully learn it all. You only learn a bit about each thing, but never a whole lot. There simply isn’t enough time in the world to do so, especially with a full-time schedule. So to say it’s frustrating is an understatement to me.

One technique I’m finding useful to juggle these interests is to create a necessary project in your mind to learn along the way. This should keep your interests level high during the learning process, while making you stay focused with one or two things at a time. For example, my next project is a web application, where I’ll strictly try to use the practices of Behavior-Driven Development while learning to use RSpec. This way, I’ll be learning a lot of different, yet related, subjects at the same time. After this project is done, I’ll see where Adobe AIR has headed, since it’s still in Beta. If it still piques my interest, I’ll create a new project for one of my current needs, and learn from there.

Being in this world of programming and technology, where it seems like time is always on fast-forward, it can be tough to keep up with what you like. But at the same time, it’s just fun. Even though I get frustrated at times, I’m having a ball learning these things. I guess it all boils down to that for now.

Note: Unfortunately, I had to take this site offline, due to its inactivity, and due to the fact that I have moved to New York City. I had plans for this site to be a starting point for me to start my own Ruby and Rails User Group in Puerto Rico, but I obviously can’t do that now. Hopefully someone in the near future in Puerto Rico will want to do something similar.

Although I finished this project a while back, I hadn’t announced it anywhere, so here it is. I just finished RailsPR.com, a site which I hope generates some much needed attention to the Ruby programming language and Rails framework here in my native land of Puerto Rico.

The main reason I started this site is because the IT industry in Puerto Rico is currently just centered on Microsoft products. I’ve said in a previous post that I really don’t mind Microsoft, and I think some of their products are great. However, with so many stable and useful open-source alternatives in the market, from operating systems to programming languages, I don’t see why it should be this way.

I’ve been learning and using Ruby for most of this current year, along with Rails. And it still baffled me whenever I talk to other programmers, they don’t even know what Ruby is. They’re still stuck with the same Visual Basic teachings they had in college. There are even some still using COBOL.

So my mission with this site is to create a community where interested programmers from Puerto Rico can be together in one place, sharing their knowledge and experiences, which is really what open-source is all about. It would make me proud to have my site be one of the main reasons people got into Rails.