What a Long Strange Trip it's Been

samantha — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:32:00 -0600

I was looking back and reading an older post that I wrote just a little over 9 months ago. In the post, I wax half poetic, half dramatic, about hitting the proverbial Wall of Dumbfoundedness.

To those who don't feel like reading the post, the story goes a little something like this:

I was starting on a Rails project after messing around with a few tutorials. I made a 20-some column table (normalization? who needs normalization?) to hold all of my 'stuff'. I wasn't sure how to populate the table. I wondered if I should have made more tables to hold my data.

So, moving on to today, which is 9 months and 2 weeks later, I can say to myself, "Of course you should have created more tables." Of course, sometimes there can be a use for a 20 column table (I'd imagine) but when you're dealing with data the way I intended on dealing with data, putting all of it into one table isn't the way to go. I would've had massive amounts of duplicate data. Which makes me wonder, "How many times can I use the word data in one paragraph?"

In any case, it's a good feeling to look back on yourself and see that you've grown. Today I was working with some Ruby code trying to figure something out. Something that would've taken me days to figure out a few weeks or a couple of months ago only took me a few hours to figure out. Again, it's just a great feeling.

Hopefully at some point I"ll be able to write more interesting posts regarding little things I find in Ruby, Rails, or Perl. All I can say to myself at this juncture is: "20 columns? 20 columns?"

What a long strange trip it's been. (ok, so nine months ain't all that long. Unless you're a pregnant woman, in which case, nine months is probably one hell of a long time.)

mindful iterations: What a Long Strange Trip it's Been

What a Long Strange Trip it's Been