Archive for March, 2009

Take The Risk – It’s Totally Worth It

Posted on March 11th, 2009 in Opinion | Comments

The following post is something I sent a friend who’s still works at my former workplace. She was feeling a bit down due to the circumstances that have been happening there (and that I know all too well), so I offered her this piece of advice. This really isn’t technology related or anything, but it’s something I wanted to post to keep on my blog, to remind myself whenever I feel stuck in my life.

You’ve been there much longer than I was, and you know better than I that nothing will ever change. When I left, I was obviously happy, but I still felt a bit bad for those who stayed behind. But as I think about it, the people who have stayed are usually because of their own choice. It might sound cruel, and it’s not my intention to make it sound like I’m a heartless bastard, but usually people are in negative situations because of themselves, because they don’t do anything about it.

I spent the better part of 2007 doing everything I could to find a new job – I would learn new things related to my field, I would scour job sites, looking for jobs that sounded better than my current situation at the time, I would send resumes all over the place. It takes a while, and you get pretty damn frustrated when you get interviewed by companies and never hear back from them. But I’m a firm believer that if you want something and you work for it, eventually everything falls into place.

I want you to take a moment and honestly assess yourself. Have you done anything to improve your current work situation? If not, why haven’t you done anything? Are those situations really impeding your ability to move on to something better, or are they just excuses for procrastinating? On the same note, if you are doing something to try to make things better, are you giving it your all? You’ll need to really want something to have a good chance at getting it.

I tell you these things because for a while I was pissed off because things didn’t get better. In reality, they weren’t getting better because while I thought I was trying to make things better, I really wasn’t doing much to improve anything. Sometimes you need to take a good, long, hard look at yourself to find what’s wrong. Only then can you begin to take steps to cure everything.

Hopefully you don’t take this message the wrong way. I got nothing but love for you, and I’m truly happier when someone is doing awesome than when I do well myself. I want to see my friends succeed even more than I do. So I hope you’ll be able to do so. And if you need help, then what the hell am I here for?

The above post truly reflected my life a few years back. I was miserable, feeling stuck in a job with no opportunity to shine or do anything worthwhile. But I realized I really wasn’t doing anything to help my situation. So it was pretty stupid of me to be angry at the world when it was really my fault. Once I realized that and got my ass back on track, things started falling into place.

This whole mindset I sent my friend was due to a book that was recommended to me, called The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want. I admit, I’m pretty skeptical about these types of books, but Mike Hernacki (the author) kept this secret as simple as possible. It all boils down to one thing: If you want something, you must be willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish it. That’s it. Simple, isn’t it? And it’s so true. People are so afraid to take risks, that opportunities pass them by when they could’ve reached out and taken control of what they wanted.

I’m pretty happy at this moment in my life. But if the need ever arises to find change, I know what to do. I hope my friend does too.

What Have I Been Up To?

Posted on March 6th, 2009 in Books, Databases, Mac, Open Source, Opinion, Programming, Ruby On Rails | Comments

It’s been quite a while since I last updated this blog. I should seriously start writing more often. So, what have I been up to? With the cold weather here in New York City, it gets difficult sometimes to go out and have fun in the city. As usual, most of my time is spent on technology, software development, stuff like that. Here’s a brief recap of what I’ve been working on:

Got a new MacBook Pro, and I love it – I finally gave in and bought myself a shiny new MacBook Pro. I’m having a blast with it. For the open-source developer in me, this has everything I could ever want. It’s a beautiful and sleek machine that has gotten me highly motivated to start expanding my knowledge in different directions. While I still consider these laptops to be pricey, they’re really great.

Learning Objective-C for Mac and iPhone development – Since I got a nice Mac, I figured I should start learning Objective-C, then eventually get into Cocoa and the iPhone SDK. I’ve always been impressed by some nicely-done open-source Mac applications, and iPhone apps have always seemed to be so creative, so I wanted to learn how to build some myself. Since I’ve been working for so many years on dynamically typed languages (like PHP and Ruby), it’s kind of a total change of pace to go back to a somewhat-statically typed language like Objective-C. It’s been a bit of a challenge, since I last used a C-based language back in my college days. But it’s going along well so far.

I’ve compiled quite a few resources for learning all of these things. I recently purchased a book called Programming In Objective-C, which seems like the de-facto book on Objective-C, as it’s pretty extensive..And there are a few good screencasts – PeepCode developed a screencast dubbed Objective-C for Rubyists, and The Pragmatic Programmers have a screencast series by Bill Dudney called Coding in Objective-C. Of course, Apple has done a fine job with their Objective-C documentation. All of these resources should get you coding in Objective-C in no time.

The iPhone development part is mostly being learned because at my day job we would like to create a nice iPhone app for users of our site. I truly think that a mobile interface will expand our user base easily, even if people say they don’t really use mobile interfaces for a lot of things. I find myself using Facebook and Amazon’s iPhone apps more than I visit their sites.

BarterQuest is getting better and better – It’s been a wild ride on BarterQuest since we launched. We’ve been featured all over the place, from blogs to television shows, and we’re getting more and more users visiting, registering and trading on our site every single day. I’ve even traded twice already, and everything has gone as smoothly as it possibly could. It’s a great way to get the stuff you want by getting rid of the stuff you don’t want.

If you haven’t checked out our site yet, or haven’t done so in a while, I highly recommend you visit us soon. We’re going to be adding support for Real Estate in a few weeks, so our range of tradable items will greatly expand. And stay up to date with all that we’re doing by following us on Twitter.

Learning (and liking) CouchDB – My curiosity with CouchDB started when people were mentioning it quite a bit, and some Rails libraries like CouchRest were gaining some attention. So I checked it out for the first time, and I had no freakin’ clue why someone would use document-oriented databases, when relational databases did just fine.

Then a week I was working on a side project, and when trying to design my classes, I noticed that I would either have to denormalize my database tables, or be strict with normalization, but have a rather messy database schema. Then it just hit me – I finally knew the reason why CouchDB would rock in this scenario, where the data I was storing wouldn’t always follow the same structure. So I got into it, and I’m really liking it a whole lot. It’s something different, yet really useful in some situations. Seeing that there’s a market for databases like these, like Amazon SimpleDB, it seems like CouchDB (and document-oriented databases in general) will gain much popularity in the foreseeable future.

These are just a few things I’m playing along with. It seems like there are a lot of fun times ahead in software development and computing in general. I’m just happy to be able to ride the wave.