spacing hack

yelyah

solo piano 20100914

Note to self: used the digi piano's speakers instead of headphones connected to the virtual piano, so if something sounds funny, I can blame that.

I've been meaning to try to shift my music schedule to earlier in the day. A huge part of that being that my sleep schedule is now such that I'm ready for bed about the time that I'm trying to sit down and write. It's no fun to try to write or create anything when you're in the midst of an energy dip. Plus, it's counter productive, since I generally wake myself up enough to work on music, that I end up pushing back my bedtime by an hour at least.

So today's self-instilled drama is that I've decided that I have to pick a language/framework for web development this week. No more stalling.

I'm annoyed at myself because I had just started feeling competent in Python when I started chasing after Javascript frameworks. The thing is, I need to learn JS anyway for the client-side stuff I'd like to start working on eventually, so if I learn server-side javascript, it will help when I switch to the client-side stuff since I'll already know the language.

The problem? Javascript just doesn't mesh well with me. Too verbose, too much flagrant punctuation.

I've looked into coffeescript, but I've had problems with the interactive shell not accepting anything that has to be typed on multiple lines. And I'm learning that interactive shells are vital for me to get comfortable with a language. Being able to throw random commands at a shell prompt helps immensely with learning the syntax in general and also for debugging what you've written. I've written plenty of from-scratch code in python's interactive shell to test my logic before it ever gets committed to a file. It just works well for me.

So the problem I'm currently stuck with is that I have several website ideas that I'd like to get cracking on. But I've opened pandora's box. Chasing after the JS stuff made me realize that I'm really not all that content with Google App Engine. It's worked well for the wickedwx site, but so much of what I've written for it, has felt fundamentally... hack-ish. Code bound together with duct tape. And it seems like the datastore is slower than it should be. And it's led me to write things where I basically was writing the equivalent of a database table, to a single database row. It got the job done, but I don't feel real comfortable with continuing to do things like that.

One of the things that bothers me fundamentally about continuing with App Engine, is that I'm at the mercy of Google. If they change something big, I'm screwed. I can't just move my app elsewhere, I have to rewrite my app. Which leads me to think that maybe I'm better off if I just pick something else now and deal with it.

One sign that I'm not acting completely rationally is the fact that Django should be fairly high up on my list of what tools I'm looking at. But it's not. In the time that I was completely out of the programming game... well, it doesn't seem like Django's changed much. There's nothing there that I'm excited about it. To me, it seems like it should've progressed much further than it did in the time that I was "gone".

I'm even to the point where I'm considering trying Ruby on Rails again. And by "again", I mean for the first time since like 2005.

Whatever I end up going with, I've decided that I should commit to using that thing for at least a month. That should give me enough time to get up to speed and build something useful. And a month should be enough time to show whether or not that tool was useful for me. Rather than the bit I've got now, where I have to stare at code as an outsider and try to decide whether I'll like it or not.

And note of course that this theme is common to my life in general. There's a reason why I've used Cakewalk, Logic, Sonar, Ableton Live, Fruity Loops, Reason, Pro Tools, and Record.

I can't make up my damn mind.