Development Kaizen
I am definitely not a person that believes in making New Year resolutions. Not that the idea is not laudable; I just believe more in continual improvement (Kaizen) instead of only focusing on improvement once a year. I decided to change jobs recently and work with a great Phoenix Advertising Agency, which is a good step for me professionally and is definitely helping me improve my development skills. During my time off this past Christmas between jobs I decided to make a few changes in my development process. This was not a result of the coming New Year; rather I had much more time on my hands to actually sit down and think about where I wanted to progress in the future. I until recently had about 8,000 bookmarks on my Delicious account since I practically bookmarked everything I saw. Whether it had to do with web development, design, Linux administration, etc., I would bookmark it in case I ever needed it. The first two steps of my big change started with a realization: I was trying to wear too many hats.
Part of the problem with trying to do so much is the fact that I never become satisfactorily adroit in any of those facets; I only know a little about a lot. I made a decision that I would focus my efforts fully on being a web application programmer and any other skills I acquire are secondary or unnecessary. Web programming is what really makes me happy. However, I would rather hire or partner with someone when I required a skill set that surpassed the basics of another discipline.
Consequently, the next step in this process was to obliterate my bookmarks and save only the essentials of what I need. The bookmark count is currently below 2,000 and the number continues to decline. In cleaning so many bookmarks out, I observed a staggering amount of duplication and iterations that were superfluous. As a Ruby developer, many of the bookmarks and resources I relied on have moved to Github, which abstracts out quite a bit. Github has basically become my new Delicious, which brought me to another epiphany: I don’t really need Delicious any more.
I really love the idea of having all my bookmarks accessible to me from anywhere, but I’m now to the point where Github has basically taken over the need for anything else. Since my focus is application development with Ruby, most of what I need and work on can be managed through Github. I can find, host, fork, and contribute code from wherever I am and (almost) whenever I need it. Since I decided to try this out, I realized that I should consolidate all of my bookmarks into usable chunks that would basically become what I am now calling my toolkit.
I am focusing my efforts to not only develop my skills with programming web applications, but also to make the most of my time. I aim to utilize the power of Rails, Textmate, the shell, Github, and my Mac in general to create a reusable toolkit that will hopefully allow me to reach my goals. I will be publishing this toolkit on Github for others to share and hopefully make even better. News will hopefully come soon when the toolkit starts to shape into how I envision it to be.
