TurboGears Case Study

After consulting with my good friend and trusted programming advisor Evan Cofsky from The Unix Man Consulting, I have decided to learn TurboGears. TurboGears is a framework for producing Web Applications. I'm going to use it to create a Trade Journaling application for my personal trade tracking and to sell as a subscription service. I've been meaning to teach myself Python for some time now because it appears to be such a clean and powerful programming language; a language without all the complaints I have with other programming languages I've worked with (VB, Java, PERL, PHP). TurboGears seems to be a simple starting point for a web application with many of the domain-specific problems of the Web Application Environment (or lack thereof) already solved, which frees up the developer (yours truly) to focus on solving the business problems.

All that sounds well and good, but now for the problems: 1) I've never programmed with Python before. Yes, I know Relational Database and Object Oriented design as well as the next hack, but never in Python. 2) I only learned about the existence of TurboGears at about 9am on Monday (two days ago) when I rudely awoke Evan with my inspired idea of creating my trade journalling application.

So here I am 3 days later. I've gone through the install guide which made installation a total breeze, the 20 Minute Wiki screencast, and the Multiuser Todo List Tutorial. After asking Evan for some advice for choosing the underlying database ORM, I'm planning to use SQLAlchemy instead of the standard SQLObject. I'm now up to lesson 4 in splee's excellent SimpleBlog tutorial which gives plenty of practical use of SQLAlchemy. Tomorrow I plan to start my own application for tracking employee's work time.

My rather ambitious goal: to create a fully functional Time Card/Employee Tracking application in 5 days without having any previous experience with the language nor framework. Wish me luck!

Neosporin Lesson

I was playing with Wannabe (my cat) on Friday and somewhere along the way she crossed the line between play and full-metal-jacket attack cat! I promptly called the rumble to a halt and Wannabe blinked at me as if to say what's wrong with that? After a quick inspection, noting the nearly dozen bright pink & red scratches on my forearm, the answer was obvious enough. No problem, Wannabe isn't vicious, she just got carried away.

If you're familiar with cat scratches, you know that a simple surface scratch that doesn't even bleed can scar for weeks if not months if you don't treat it to proper care. After lathering my forearm with antibacterial soap (ouch) I applied Neosporin. The amazing part is that by Friday there will most certainly not be any evidence of the epic battle. It's only Tuesday and the scratches are already reduced to hairline traces of light pink with very little scabbing and virtually no scarring.

Does this make me a hero? No, but it did teach me a lesson. It may be a little painful to deal with problems today, but being proactive about applying the solution will always reduce the long-term cost, even if it's just the simple minimal attention each day. A little action each day goes a long way. Of course it doesn't sound all that profound, but it resonates with me today because I'm feeling overwhelmed at the tasks before me. It just seems like there's so much to do and that I'm so far behind that I can't possibly catch up. It's that defeatist mentality voice that occasionally insists upon being entertained; but rather than continuing the delay of action, and allowing the problems to fester, I have begun to take action. Yes, I'm getting back into the market, and I started last night. I'm also working on balancing out my days a little better so that I don't go crazy.