All roads lead to Rails

I love open source and I love Rails.  At present I think I’m of average capability at one full year of experience in the field, but I also think that Rails developers are swaggering compared to others doing comparable work in Java, C#, and PHP, communities all of which replete with durable, important open source projects, but I often suspect that the Rails opinionati have foregone a certain dubious effect for the sake of its cause, regarding open source projects in general.  I hear the claim often enough that in combination with a few aha eureka moments, that working on open source projects is the bar none best way to establish income and credibility as a developer.

I’m not convinced.  Nor do I develop automated testing for the same, ostensibly foregone effect.  Rails speakers don’t encourage us to learn automated testing, they just slur its absence.  And it’s not that I don’t want to contribute to open source.  I find myself with a few good ideas for improving on a couple open source projects in particular, but neither of them require rails jocks.

Please take a poll on the subject.

twtpoll.com/zra2re

After 18 months on twitter as tefflox, I found a development partner, Katherine.   Our skill levels and experience are comparable, though she is 10 years younger.  I think that I felt my tweets completed, and when it began to feel settled that she and I would continue to work together on Grantvote, I pushed the supernova button on my old twitter account.  I’ve since re-upped with a smaller scope, but the tone lingers.

Anyhow, I watched the Web version of a Ruby Users Group presentation on Web entrepreneurship.   He talks about the need for a designer, but I think the point is that you need another entrepreneur, someone who can think in terms of ideas and act on them.  It’s tough to find someone with compatible skill and temperament.  It’s tough to distinguish an idea from a wishful thought.  Practice helps.

You can’t put much faith in the wisdom of entrepreneurs.  It’s being smart, and entrepreneurs are only as smart as what we’re doing right now.  Web technology is a great place for the entrepreneur mind.  It moves too fast for the stubborn hierarchies and conduits of the main to keep up.

Web technology, the proving grounds.  Viva!  Just don’t go it alone.

http://joncrawford.com/entries/web-entrepreneurship-presentation-at-kcrug

http://joncrawford.com/entries/a-healthy-info-diet

Solitude

the old professor
describes the classical

smile and its vanishing
over a generation

iconography
once real in the world

once described
imputed

isolates vanishing
as a bluebird devours a robin’s nest

devours yearly
documents isolation

vanishing
candela

Keeping your distance

Chaos will resist a cold space, warp itself into a lightness.
What can the living imagine our fears to be more comprehensible?
The farthest visibility bearing the full recondite salt is the moon.

Love in your eyes

trackless frontiers

on the wrong day

cry to you

pretending to comedy

appear later on TV

Skeletons

vortexes

of

then walking
presumably alone
then fright

reprehensibly

alien—
the fence weathers
for the moss will grow—
silently

radiance

of shade and rain

One of the most profound images from high school comes from an ordinary weekend night in western Kansas.  Atwood is a town of about 1,500 residents, and a favored activity for high school students is to cruise the eight-block strip, turn back at the start of residential zoning, and repeat.  I must have been 17, and one night I recall seeing an earlier graduate back in town after the homecoming game.  I didn’t know her.  Hadn’t met her.  Only someone told me who she was, recognizable in her blue Camaro.  To be honest, I don’t remember if she had actually stopped and stood beside the car at the turn-around point.  She may have just been turning around.  Though in my memory she is standing, almost in the manner of the Statue of Liberty.  It’s not about a crush, or love gone wrong, or anything like that… just a brief moment of observation that becomes an ideal impression, now fulfilled.

Today I got a letter from the Rawlins County Historical Society.  Along with Ruth and Irven Hayden (parents of Kansas Governor Mike Hayden), is profiled a young family where she is married to one of the few upperclassmen who didn’t bully me.  Pictured is a happy family (the husband looking more distinctly happy than in high school), of two parents, two daughters and a son.

Chad Daniel Fields is the son of Dan Fields and Debbie (Reinert) Rummel.  His grandparents are Dallas Fields of Norton, Effie Fields of Atwood, and Dorothy (Holub) Reinert and the late Frank Reinert, of Atwood.  Chad was born in Mountain Home, Missouri, on May 2, 1974, but his parents moved back to Rawlins County when he was three months old.  Chad was part of the three Atwood Buffalos football teams that won state in 1989, 1990, and 1991.  He graduated from Atwood High School in 1993.  He has lived in Rawlins County since then, except when he attended Fort Hays State University.  Chad farms with his dad part-time and works full-time at Beaver Valley Supply Co.  He is an avid stock car driver, winning the Thomas County Speedway 2007 track championship in the Econo class.  He has since moved up to the IMCA Hobby Stock class, and is hoping for another championship bid in 2009.

Wendy Jean (Holmdahl) Fields is the daughter of Roger Holmdahl and Jean (Mazza) Holmdahl.  She was born on November 23, 1971, in Atwood.  She grew up 12 miles east of Atwood, on the farm her great-grandfather homesteaded in the 1890s.  After graduating from Atwood High School in 1990, Wendy moved away to attend college, first at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, then at Fort Hays State University where she received her B.A. in modern languages in 1994.  She lived in Hays, Tucson, Arizona, and Great Bend before returning to Atwood in 1999.  She works full-time at Lewis, Beims and Holste, Ltd. law firm in Atwood, and has recently started her own business, The Perfect Word Copy-editing Service.

Chad and Wendy were married on May 10, 2003, at the Rawlins County Historical Church in Atwood.  Between them, Chad and Wendy have three children: Emily Jean Fields, born in Hays, Kansas, on September 23, 1995; Jordynn Rylee Fields, born in Colby, Kansas, on July 5, 2000; and Alexander Daniel Fields, born in Oberlin, Kansas, on May 16, 2004.  Emily is active in sports, participating in volleyball, basketball and track.  Jordynn is part of the Creative Movements gymnastics team.  Alexander is passionate about racecars, trucks, tractors and spaceships.

My warmest blessings to Chad, Wendy and family.  May you celebrate a 65th anniversary like Ruth and Irv Hayden.