I’ve heard of writers block, but coders block? Who knows. All I know is that I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. After pushing out the first version of our metasearch tool, our group sat back and looked at retooling the program in Ruby. Partly to make it easier to do R&D prototyping faster, partly to hide the XML backend a little bit more from the UI designers. Great. I spend 3 days recoding much of the backend components. I actually found I like ruby quite a bit. Then I started travelling. I had a couple of speaking engagements, then ALA and next thing I know — I’m having a really hard time getting started again. And not just this project — most all of them. So what to do —
Well, I took some time over the 4th to take a break with family and then went back to working on MarcEdit. This is one of my favorite hobbies — working with MarcEdit and crunching metadata — and I think it worked. I spent a number of days last week engrosed in finishing the script maker and after finding a stopping point, starting working in Ruby again. Last night, I spent a good couple of hours working on ruby again. I’ve been needing to write a wrapper class around the protocol classes that I’ve been developing, and was actually able to make quite a bit of progress, so whooho.
Its odd though — I’ve never had the interuptions of travel throw me out of wack like it did this time. And it was funny because I really wanted to do a lot of coding — but each time I sat down to do it — I just drew a blank.
–TR