How to Learn Programming in the First Decade of the New Century

If you're intimidated by tech gobbledygook, turn back now. If you've always wanted to join the ranks of the tech-speaking, app-spinning inner circle, then please cautiously continue. With this blog topic, we'll be diving real-deep, real-fast, and breaking this topic off from the HitTail blog real soon, so it doesn't weigh down the HitTail message of driving more traffic to your site for free.

With that preamble disclaimer done, here we go...

I plan on making the ultimate, free, portable, flexible rapid open source development platform possible, able to be understood and utilized by the largest population possible. I plan on sharing the experience witht he HitTail audience (for starters), and eventually the general Marketing/Programming world.

I'll be using it for professional and personal projects alike. It will replace what I currently use, and refer to as my "Generalized System 3" (GS3). And I'll explain my choice of PHP vs. Python vs. Ruby vs. Lisp vs. JavaScript vs. Java vs. .NET, etc.

But before you get too excited about a big programming language shoot-out, please know I'm probably going to use Ruby, and maybe even just extend Ruby on Rails (ROR) in an obsolescence-resistant fashion. What makes this endeavor different from every other ROR tutorial is the granularity with which I'll be documenting the process, and how the finished product will probably be able to be carried around on a keychain, or perhaps as a continuously running webserver on tomorrow's mobile phones. But it will definitely able to be run as a virtualized instance on any of today's mainstream hardware/OS platforms, making it of immediate use (PCs, Macs, Linux, etc.). It will be the killer, ultimate, free, be-anywhere, do-anything programming buddy—cool enough to let you spin scalable enterprise-class apps, and show-up the "take-six-months-to-write-a-spec" crowd.

This new generalized system and agile development framework is likely to be used on places in the HitTail site, as well as for Connors clients. In the spirit of David Heinemeier Hansson and 37Signals, I'll be sharing the process, and much of the code with the world, in the hopes of creating a lot of corollary excitement surrounding HitTail. In the spirit of Paul Graham (Lisp) and Hansson (Ruby), I believe strongly in the merits of a language and agile framework as being a source of extreme competitive advantage.

It's hard to say precisely where I'll go with this project, but the first baby-step starts out here (in describing the project), and I will tap the power of my existing GS3, which provides a baby-step documentation framework, and a minimum-model for what the new stuff should support.

So, this post starts a long and interesting journey, which is more of a side-project to HitTail than directly HitTail-related. While it's not precisely HitTail-related, this is currently the best soapbox I have, and therefore the place I'd like to get it started. And I plan on rolling out a tutorial style I hope will sweep the Internet, called "baby step tutorials". True baby-steps are possible on the Internet in a way they're not in other media like books, because to document every little step would kill too many trees with paper. But with .html files, it just pumps up page views and makes me more money if I run advertising. So, it's a double-win. I document with insanely granular detail.

This process should be of interest to programmer-wanna-be's of the sort that fill the ranks of Marketing departments around the world, who are generally intimidated by the choices, tools, and discussions that surround getting started with programming. Have you looked at the selection of books in the programming section of a Barnes and Noble or Borders lately? It's crazy! I'll explain along the way why this is, and what the "most right" choices for the "least-programmer-like" people are. The average citizen can be a programmer today, with minimum fuss. You're not on the bleeding edge anymore. Programming's easy stuff.

And unlike previous attempts I've made at doing this, I'll do it right this time. The reason that it will not be an aborted attempt this time (I've had false starts in the past) is that I'll be leveraging the power of my already created GS3 as a blue-print, plus the best of what's out there today, plus I have HitTail's momentum and celebrity to ride. I now know what it means to finish things and do them right.

The public will be able to observe, interact, push me forward, and tweak me in certain directions as I go.

While this blog post kicks it off, I will use the comment field underneath to link into the non-blog pages, where this will reside.

Managing Dangerously Addicting Distractions

Now for a totally off-topic post for the HitTail blog: managing distractions and ensuring professional effectiveness. This post itself is such a distraction. One of the biggest dangers to productivity is media. I both AM the media (in my blogging activities) and user of media in my ceaseless consumption of news and blogs. In fact, I'm at the end of a one-year self-imposed moratorium against TV, as it is the worst time-wasting offender, and I needed it out of my life in order to help create and launch HitTail. But I just ended that moratorium by becoming the latest Triple Play sucker. But also, I'm in the third month of a 3-month Connors Communications client engagement with perhaps the most ambitious goals yet--nothing short of changing the DNA/Religion/Culture of a media company to have a sort of fierce online competitiveness.

It takes nothing less than my full focus.

But HitTail's going on, and it's hard to let my baby grow up on its own.

But I have to!

And to achieve that, I need to shut down distractions with extreme prejudice. And I'm just too weak willed. Even now I feel the pull of the Search Hits tab, which is more addictive than caffeine. We didn't win the PRWeek PR innovation of the year, so I'm trying to make the best of that, with a congratulatory post, so that maybe some people will see that the third runner up is at least as innovative as opening a transparent PR firm in a virtual world--OK, that's pretty cool. You have to love the symbolism. And finally, I'm deliberating over not getting into the early beta of SpotPlex. Spotplex, if you can hear us: "please let us in!" And one thing leads to the next, so it starts an endless vicious cycle of online promotion addiction. Yes, you can actually be addicted to carrying out an online public relations campaign.

So, this blog post is about my journey in getting these distractions under control, so I can get back to 12 hour days.

The first step to my eliminating distractions is confidence in my people. I have to ignore stuff that my detail-oriented mind wants to delve into. But I invested a lot in my people, and I have to trust them to make good decisions. The HitTail DEV team rocks. I can turn off all distractions and not worry about disaster striking.

Second, I identify all the distraction vectors, and there's a lot in this new online and wired world of ours. Distraction vectors include phone, PC and drive-by's. The phone and drive-by's are easily dealt with by turning off the phone and isolating myself as best I can. It's not enough to physically isolate yourself anymore. Now, you've got to turn off IM, quit out of email, turn off email pop-up notifications, remove extra icons from the task tray and the quick-launch toolbar, and clean up the desktop. If using a web browser is part of your work, you have to turn off StumbleUpon and any other silly distraction magnets that got plugged in. This line of reasoning has led at least one software developer to come up with a distraction-free word processor. And now, I'm inevitably doing all my work through remote desktop, so I have my full development environment wherever I am, so I have to make sure the connection is fast enough so that the terminal server latency isn't too distracting (it always is--but the benefits far outweigh the cost).

My ideal work environment would be an isolation sensory deprivation chamber with one and only one application running in front of me, taking up almost my entire field of vision, but for a keyboard and mouse. Whenever I needed to venture into the vast wasteland of longtail garbage that is the Internet, I would need the online equivalent of horse blinders to induce the sort of myopia that prevents even the opportunity for distraction from occurring. I don't know what's worse: Google or the CrackBerry. Both are supposed to be profoundly enabling, but turn out to be profoundly derailing. Wait until the iPhone hits, and you can have all your information addiction in one pocket-sized package.

So, this is enough writing to get me back on track for today. Having voiced this issue helps make me hyper aware. This article IS my horse blinders. It will now lurk in the edge of my consciousness, reigning me back in whenever a distraction starts to take hold.

I can also take proactive measures to cut distractions off at the pass. For example, I go in through 3 layers of computers to do my remote desktop work: local PC, NAT'ed office work PC, and finally, the DMZ'd servers. And each one threatens to let the distractions of the prior level leak through with ziggurat of Window taskbars. So I use the version of remote desktop that can open full-screen (not the MMC snap-in), and remove the "pin" to make the remote desktop yellow bar go away. So, it looks like I'm in just one PC.

And finally, I fed by blogging addiction, knowing that this will carry me for a few days.

Now, onto some serious work.