Chad Fowler co-authored the book Programming Ruby 1.9: The Pragmatic Programmers' Guide (Facets of Ruby) and is a huge advocate of Rails. The book is a practical guide to growing as a professional software developer and is broken down into many 2-5 page sections focusing on a specific concept related to accomplishing this goal.

Some general themes permeate the entire 200 page text. One in particular is to embrace the opportunities that exist in a world where many software development roles are being outsourced overseas. He outlines a number of ways to take advantage of this situation to position yourself in a way where you are more attractive to potential employers, even the ones doing the outsourcing.

He encourages a constant, methodical, evaluation of your skillset in order to target your research and development towards the technologies that will become desirable next. Stay ahead of the wave instead of being tossed around by it.

Each section ends with an "Act On It!" portion which provides actionable tasks that reinforce the concept you've just read. Many of these are good suggestions and are easily incorporated into your day to day activities.

Another concept is the idea that your career in software development, essentially yourself, should be treated as a product. A product which requires constant attention in both R&D and marketing. Staying stagnant too long and not expanding the tools in your chest is a recipe for opportunity passing you by. Marketing suggestions include blogging and contributing to open source projects.

If you've lost the passion for software development. This book may provide just enough insight and food for thought to encourage you to get back on the right track and return to the days where you typed away into the wee hours of the night, not because you were getting paid, but because you loved it.

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In 1994, I met Matt at junior high orientation.  I didn't know it at the time, but I had met a kindred soul.  We both loved good rock music, were good at sports (we are still undefeated in 2-on-2 basketball), and strived to lead a logical, reasoned life.  We had also perfected the art of pulling good grades doing absolutely no schoolwork, but that's for another day.  But perhaps the shared interest that would define our friendship was the computer.  Back then Matt had a 486, I had a 386.  Matt was using Prodigy for internet access, I had AOL 2.0 at home, on a 14.4 modem.  Obviously we played video games (Carmen Sandiego?) but we also started messing around with batch file programming, and generally loved to tinker with our machines.  I cannot tell you how many times I have had to restore my computer from scratch due to the ramifications of excessive (and uninformed) curiosity.  In any case, in November of 1995, we came into contact with a magazine that would literally change the course of our lives forever.  Matt, having the more powerful computer, was into a game called Cyberia, which I remember having insane graphics for it's time.  We purchased the November 1995 issue of Electronic Entertainment magazine, which featured Cyberia.  In the back of that magazine was an article called "How To Make Your Own Web Page", which turned out to be a 3 page tutorial on basic HTML.  Really basic.  We read the article and were hooked.   We had to try this out.

The first time I tried to make an HTML page, I used MS Word.  It took me a few minutes to realize that the formatting that Word does to a document makes it pretty much unreadable to a browser.  The only plain-text editor I had was Notepad.  And so I started using Notepad.  To this day, 13 years later, I code every single file by hand, be it a stylesheet or a PHP script, in a text editor.  Ok, I confess: I had a job after college where I was doing J2EE development and we used IBM WebSphere Development Studio, but Java is such a pain to develop with, I think I can be forgiven for using an IDE!  And in college I did take  VB class, but I was forced to, so don't hold that against me.

Anyway, fast forward a few months through many late night "coding" sessions, constantly tweaking the layouts of our pages (F5 became the most used key on my keyboard), and searching for awesome animated gifs (spinning globes!) and we were experts in the art of webpage creation.  We used AOL's free homepages at the time, because 13 year olds didn't have the money for hosting back then, which was ridiculously expensive compared to today's options.  We formed a fake company called "DeltaSoft".  Our first homepages were really just links to sites we liked, and some information about us.  Nothing crazy.  The first big idea we had was conceived at a sleepover, in the early hours of the morning.  We were going to Action Park the next day with my church's youth group, and we were hanging out in the living room drinking iced tea and eating popcorn (late night snack of champions).  We were talking about what we could do with DeltaSoft, and we had the idea of starting the DeltaSoft Network.  Basically our two separate sites would be part of a larger umbrella site of homepages.  We could let others join the DeltaSoft network and start their own homepages.  We would need hosting space, to be sure, and we weren't sure how exactly program with something dynamic like that.  The thought of making money hadn't crossed our minds yet.  Call us naive.  In retrospect, this idea was like the social networking sites of the present.  At the time, however, we didn't realize that there already existed such a service.  Anyone remember GeoCities?  But it didn't matter.  Excited by the possibilities of a network of separate but related websites, we set to work.  What would the content be?  That was yet undecided.  What would drive visitors there?  Still undecided.  But we had an idea and we were going to execute it.

Stay tuned for Part II later this week, in which we become 15 year high school students making $1500 a month from our websites, and are able to purchase bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches for lunch, making our classmates jealous.

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