New Language

When I was in school in 2011 I had to do a report on a web framework. My report was on Ruby on Rails. I found it very interesting that a Japanese graduate student invented Ruby because he didn't like any other language out there. 

Ever since then I've wanted to create my own language. Every language out there has something that gets in the way of a smooth process. Java and objective-c are too wordy, for C++, programmers keep messing up memory management and Python is slow. 

The other day I started to write down some ideas on what my language would look like and I came to the conclusion that I don't have enough new ideas to go ahead right now but I will keep thinking about it and in about 5 years I will look at it again. 

I do have one idea I would like to share. For years now we have had memory management.  Now with multi core processing we need thread management. The rules to multithreading are just too simple for it to not be run by the compiler. The simpler the tools, the more it will get used. 

It's been a while

So much has happened since my last post. When I last left you I was working on a winery website with my brother in law. We got to the point where we need to make some decisions and start spending money and I couldn't get my brother in law to sit down and go over the site. Since then I have had no motivation to work on it. 

So what to work on next? I have been talking to a coworker Ken Wagner and we came up an idea for a simple app. I expect it to less than a month to complete. I look forward to working on it. 

Update

It's been 12 days since my last post and there is a good reason for it. I got a job interview and I have been preparing. 

The interview went well but they haven't contacted me yet for another interview. I really hope I get this job. 

Technical post

Exciting times!

I started this blog to document 1. What I am working on to improve my skills and 2. Talk about what I have learned. 

The last couple days I have been studying how to track users to my site. Usually when I need to learn something, I type in what I want to google and it returns a website, usually stack overflow and I have my answer. 

This time I didn't find what I was looking for on the first search. Past experience says that either it's a topic no one cares about or its so simple not too many feel the need to write it down. In this case it appears to be the latter. 

When tracking a user, it turns out there really is only three key data points to get from the browser. They are the user's up address, user agent and the last website visited. 

These three data points are very valuable.  The IP address we can get the visitor's location. This is useful to customize the page or even restrict access to the site. 

The user agent provides information on the user's computer hardware, browser, operating system and screen resolution. This allows for better website customization. With this information the visitor isn't forced to view a site made for mobile on their computer or vice versa. 

The last website is useful for two reasons. One it is important to know how someone arrived at the site. They can arrived from a site linked to your site, from search engine or enter the address manually. If they enter in the address manually it's a good sign. Either word of mouth is for this site or its a favorite site of the user so they return often. If they arrived from another source then maybe these sites needs to focused on for advertising. 

As for where to get these datapoints, it's available JavaScript or server side scripting. 

Exciting Times

It's exciting times. The first iteration of my winery website is almost complete. Still a few more items to go like I need to create an about page, figure out the best way to track users, add pictures of the wineries and I really don't like the view. Also I still haven't created a mobile view yet. 

It sounds like a lot now that I write it out. I also don't have a name for the site. I know that's usually one of the first thing done, and I did have a name but I really don't like it. I do have a few ideas for a new name but the domains aren't completely available. 

Overall it's been a pretty good weekend. I should be able to complete my goal of finishing by the end of the month. Then it's onto mobile. 

Snow Day

When I was a kid I used to love waking up, looking outside and seeing the neighborhood covered in snow. Then I would turn on the TV and see all the school districts closed except mine. My school district was always the one district that was opened and on time. Way to ruin a kid's day. 

As an adult I still love snow, I just don't like driving in it. Luckily I got a job that lets me work from home sometimes and I gladly took advantage of this today. I usually don't like working from home but I do love saving an hour from not having to commute. 

I was able to use this extra hour to work on my web app. I got a lot done. It doesn't look like it because I fixed mostly minor stuff. This list of minor stuff I hope to get done by Monday so I can move onto the next task. 

As for the job search I haven't found a job ad that I qualify for all week. I remember last year the ads were this dry so I'm not worried. I'm looking forward to getting more work done tomorrow. 

One crazy day

You might notice the date of this post matches the previous. The reason for this is I wrote the first blog entry on another site. This morning I went to look at it and I realized that other site keeps all blogs private so I'm moving onto a new site.

Today was a crazy day. It started off by sitting down in front of my computer and my chair broke underneath me causing me to fall to the ground. I was so upset by this I didn't feel like making breakfast so I stopped by McDonald's on the way to work. But of course McDonald's screwed up my order so I had to go back and get it fixed.

At work since it was the first Monday after the thanksgiving weekend I forgot what I was working on last Wednesday. No major issues from this but I did have a bug that I blame on the weekend. What happened is on Wednesday I copied and pasted some code and then modified it. The problem is I forgot to change one function call. Then today I assumed that part of the code was correct but I just couldn't get it to run right. Since I assumed it was correct, I spent too much time looking at other parts of the code.

Before going home My teammate had some SQL issues that never been a problem before. It wasn't really his problem either it was the customer that thought they could save some money by creating the easy forms themselves but instead they made so many mistakes and we got to fix them. Should have just created them ourselves.

After work I was able to buy a new chair. Then I searched the normal job sites and found nothing. Typical Monday. It's now 11pm. I wish I had the time to work on the website but I need to go to bed.