Ramping Up Open Source Development Time

I’ve mostly been “microblogging” updates on Diaspora recently.  That’s a fancy way of saying I haven’t been doing any in-depth writing but instead just making quick ad hoc posts on social media.  As I am now ramping up my development on open source projects, primarily Diaspora by the looks of it, I’m hoping to start posting here more frequently capturing new lessons learned, observations from  my exploration of these newer languages and code bases, and just getting more writing in.

Over the summer I actually spent a good deal of time exploring different cross platform development frameworks of the .NET and C++ variety.  That was intended to be to work on a very niche open source project idea that I had conjured up around my classic computing hobby.  By the time I made enough progress on that to the point where I could potentially be productive, although I still want to explore wxWidgets a bit more, the bug to help on alternative social media platforms bit again.

So while I’ve been pining away for the opportunity to really start getting into Kotlin, JavaFX, and other technologies, my current path is taking my down the jewel crusted path of Ruby, Ruby on Rails, and JavaScript.  These are the technologies that Diaspora is built upon.  In fact, as I’ve written before elsewhere, I’m really enjoying the language a lot.  RubyMine could use a bit of polish compared to how well it works for Java and Kotlin but it’s at least on par with the CLion C++ and Rider .NET IDEs.  Yes, I’ve fully converted over to being a JetBrains user nowadays, even paying for a full license to the entire suite.  To people who know me the fact I converted over is probably going to be a bit of a shock.  To the casual reader coming here from my non-software interests they have no idea what we are talking about, but IDEs are very personal decisions and we get wedded to them pretty hard.

Sorry for the absence.  I hope to be a regular poster again for the half dozen of you that actually read this!