So my plan is to document however long this little no having a job experiment goes on. My apologies for 95% of my readers who are non-technical but most of these little daily summaries will be focused on my learning process. I’m setting the clock as of yesterday since the first two days of the experiment last week were more mop-up type days, getting little items out of the way of the experiment. I didn’t document yesterday with anything more than my previous post. I’m sure you can understand why.
So Day 2 has been infinitely better than yesterday. I spent 4 hours this morning working on a little consulting gig I’ve got going on the side. It’s a .Net project and I’m building a very rudimentary email system for the client that sends out newsletters occasionally to the users. Sending automatic emails turns out to be harder than you might expect given all the possible email clients and whatnot, thought the .Net framework makes it at least doable (thank you AlternateView!). That’s not really very sexy work so plan to do it in the mornings while I’m still relatively fresh and motivated.
This afternoon wasn’t nearly as productive as the morning. The events of yesterday weighed heavily on my ability to concentrate and I didn’t really dive into much until after 4. Once I managed to do that, I started working through the QuickWiki tutorial for Pylons. Pylons is a framework for writing Python web pages and is very similar as best I can tell to the Rails framework for Ruby. I choose Pylons over Rails because I “know” Python whereas I would have to learn both Ruby and Rails to be at all productive there.
I finished up the tutorial and I have to say, I’m pretty happy with how easy it is to work with Pylons. There is a ton of stuff going on but it just feels so much more sane than ASP.Net development. In the last few weeks at my previous employer, I was working on rewriting a web site in ASP.net 2.0 to use a MVC pattern and it’s just not very easy in ASP.Net. With Pylons, it’s a piece of cake. My plan is to revisit the tutorial in the morning first thing and get more comfortable with the framework pieces I’ve encountered. Once that modest goal is complete, I’m begin work on a couple of pet projects that I’ve been putting off for quite awhile.
I feel some pressure to make up for lost time but I also know that I’ve got some serious learning to do. I’m looking forward to the next few days.