Announcing CODETOBER

Awesome IndyRB meetup last night. I got a lot of great recommendations for books to check out, and then had a ton of fun drinking beers and talking about projects at the Brockway pub afterwards. It's pretty awesome that we get so many new people coming to the meetups, partly because it's awesome to see such interest in Ruby and partly because it's also awesome that I'm no longer the newest coder around. After the meetup, I may have had some beers and spent some time hassling other developers about why they should be blogging more often. And then I realize I haven't blogged in what? 9 days? Who am I to hassle other people for not blogging?

But I've got an idea to remedy this. I absolutely SHOULD be blogging more often, and I'm going to take a page from my friend Miles' book and try to learn something new every day in February and then blog about it. I want to have an awesome name for this month, so I'm probably just going to call it CODETOBER. Also it's a leap year this year. WEIRD!

I've got a list going for things I want to look into or try to understand a bit. Mostly things I've heard mentioned often enough that I want to look into them, or how to use tools I'm already familiar with more effectively.

This list is pretty short, though. I'm definitely interested in learning how to dry up my code, since I feel that's a big weak point for me. And getting more familiar using Git for source control, learning more terminal shortcuts, Sass, Cucumber, HTML5 (since I'm a sucker for front-end design anyway) and I'm interested in getting more recommendations. What do you think would be beneficial to look into? Useful gems, fun tutorials, etc? I'M COUNTING ON YOU, INTERNET!

In more concrete coding news, I hung out with my friend Eli and he showed me how to dry up my Dungeon Crawler code quite a bit. I've now got one method that generates the rooms as opposed to 10 different methods! Still pretty soggy around the edges, though. And through the middle. It's actually mostly still pretty soggy.