Now that I’ve launched this blog and I hope to post on a regular basis even if the posts are short and simple so as an easy cop out I’m going to give a quick summary of things I’ve been working on:

Baltimore Node

This past Saturday we painted one of the walls and cleaned up a little bit. Plans are in the works to build work benches and we’ll be nailing down details for a DIY Guitar Pedal workshop very soon. Putting together a non-profit is a blast.

Processing

I am halfway through Daniel Shiffman’s Learning Processing book and have created a small a small project to challenge myself. It’s a take on space invaders and while nothing fancy at this point it is providing me practice with object-oriented design. I’ve learned basic input, the usage of arrays and how to implement classes. If you want to take a look at the program it’s available here.

Moving forward I will need to fix a bug in how the bullets are counted which I’ve had no luck fixing. After that I would like to add a function to reset the state, implement levels, improve the graphics and fully document the program.

Ruby on Rails

Greatest thing since sliced bread! Actually, I’m not sure because I haven’t come to fully understand how it works.

That being said I’ve managed to get a program running on my lil Powerbook and am flow charting a program to automate a data entry task at work. When finished the program will call up an email account and download any messages, the messages come from a form that contest entries so the program will have to split the information and put it into a database. Then once a week the program will collect the latest entries build them into a CSV file and email them to me so that I can import the info into our mailing list database.

If I don’t do this then I will have to train a staff member how to copy the information into excel; writing the program seems more fun.

Web Analytics: An Hour A Day

In the past year and a half of using Google Analytics I’ve gained a solid base of knowledge to say that I know enough to use data to make useful decisions but I also know that I can know a lot more. This is why I’ve set out to work my way through Avinash Kaushik book despite how thick it is. In fact, during the introduction he points out that at about an hour a day the book will take eight months to work through.

Crazy!

Well, if you are into any of these kinds of projects, particularly the Processing or RoR ones let me know because I could use some help on both fronts!