I have begun to do my research on San Francisco which will be the next major city I visit. San Francisco is a particularly interesting city because it is close to Silicon Valley. A large number of technology companies are located in San Francisco, particularly in the South Park district. I have already added several technology companies to my travel notes including; Wired Magazine, Twitter Headquarters, Reddit, and GitHub. This has given me a shot of enthusiasm for technology. I have begun a new project to “kick it up a notch”, in other words, to take my mad skills to a whole other level.
I spend way too much time on Reddit so I’m interested in the technology behind that site. I learned that Reddit was originally developed using web.py, an open source web application framework created by Aaron Swartz. web.py uses Python so it is a bit sexier than the PHP or C# programming languages I usually use. Python is the programming language that slowly chokes you to death with its layers of complexity. I am currently learning how to extend one of the sample projects, a blog which illustrates basic CRUD functionality (Create, Read, Update, and Delete).
I have also created my first GitHub repository for this project. https://github.com/rsrobbins/reading I desperately need to learn how to use Git so this is probably the best reason for doing this project. A programmer is practically unemployable if he does not know how to use Git or some other version control system. Nobody is going to hire you if you are completely ignorant when it comes to working with Git. But since I work alone most of the time, I have not had to learn how to use it. I have seen a GitHub repository before. A lot of the open source code I make use of has been moved to a GitHub repository. But the only time I found it necessary to create an account was to suggest a fix for a problem I had with SubSonic 2 where the code clearly wasn’t right.
So far I have found a GitHub repository quite useful for eliminating the need to keep this project in sync at work and at home using a thumb drive. I also like the wiki where I can keep my notes on the project. I love documentation and notes! I think this GitHub repository will also be useful as my code portfolio. Currently I find it difficult to create a portfolio since I don’t do web site designs and my custom web applications are for backend administration, so I cannot make anything available to the general public. But my GitHub repository is public and eventually it will demonstrate how I work on a project. Every little change will be available for you to backtrack, although I doubt that anyone will be interested in my work. My web application will just be a simple web site for managing the list of books I have read. This was my earliest database which I have been maintaining since the days of MS-DOS. The only interesting aspect of my project is that it will demonstrate how to use web.py to create a complete web application, and not just a bare bones web application for a crude blog. I have already solved an irritating problem with the static files for the view.html and edit.html templates.
