It's been a while.
I haven't blogged for almost a year, so I've decided to celebrate this resurrection with a huge design update. Here's a picture of the old design. I'm really happy with the updates and seeing the change convinces me even more that it was worth it.
As you might have guessed, this site is using Octopress which comes with a pretty default theme.
The theme is now really minimalistic and a couple of amazing Typekit typefaces had been included. It's using Museo Sans and Museo Slab which are hopefully really pleasant to your eyes. Another way to check which typefaces are being used is by clicking the icon in the bottom-right corner.
The front page has also been updated. As you can see in the upper-linked picture of the old design, it used to be pretty default Octopress page, which listed all posts. Font Awesome helped me in improving that. It's really an amazing site for icons. Kudos to Dave Gandy for doing an amazing job!
What changed in a past year? Nothing much, I'm still freelancing. Not as much as I would love to, considering last couple of months. I still have to finish my Bachelor's degree, so trying not to fail started to take a lot of my time. Hopefully it will end in a couple of weeks.
My love considering programming languages is still Ruby. I'm being more opened to other awesome languages, though.
I'm also learning how to build an object-oriented language on top of functional programming with Clojure from a book by Brian Marick. It's worth every penny and you should read it if you're interested in improving your thinking in a functional paradigm.
Speaking of books I've read, The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master is the one I can not recommend more. It's probably one of the best technical books I've ever read. I really like the part where the authors are trying to persuade the reader into using a fully-customizable editor over an IDE. That's just one of the gems out of the many you can find inside.
Yes, there is a Rails-related book I can also recommend. It's called Rebuilding Rails by Noah Gibbs and you should read it if you're interested in the concepts of building a Rails-like framework yourself. It keeps you away from the complexity of newer Rails versions and maintains its focus on teaching you the core of its functionality. It will not strangle you by explaining every problem the Rails core team faces in their usual day, but it will still teach you how the stuff works behind the curtains. The mantra of this book is - "You'll learn it better if you do it yourself". If you'd like to know how to write an ORM or how controllers know where the models are hiding, this book is for you. Oh, did I mention that you can download a free chapter? Go check it out!
Additionally, I've been spending some time improving my rusty C skills. I'm reading Zed Shaw's tutorial called Learn C the Hard Way. I'm enjoying it so far. Here's how he describes C:
It is the Devil, Satan, the trickster Loki come to destroy your productivity with his seductive talk of pointers and direct access to the machine. Then, once this computational Lucifer has you hooked, he destroys your world with the evil "segfault" and laughs as he reveals the trickery in your bargain with him.
But, C is not to blame for this state of affairs. No my friends, your computer and the Operating System controlling it are the real tricksters. They conspire to hide their true inner workings from you so that you can never really know what is going on. The C programming language's only failing is giving you access to what is really there, and telling you the cold hard raw truth. C gives you the red pill. C pulls the curtain back to show you the wizard. C is truth.
Zed Shaw
I like that guy.
I think I've advanced in my open source work in the past year and I have definitely learnt a lot of stuff. Let's hope I'll continue to do so. Let's also hope I'll update this page more often and let's not be surprised if we see a post about something unrelated to Ruby every now and then.
