I know I haven’t written a lot – but lately been diving deep into the world of Ruby.  It’s a pretty fun language, and I’m kinda glad I decided to start learning it in conjunction with PHP.   I’m also learning about frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Zend (for PHP).   It’s a bit different, but I understand why the framework exists — and while there’s a bit of a learning curve, I do think frameworks make code more organized.  I am definitely aspiring to keep my code more ‘DRY’ (don’t repeat yourself).

Actually I think learning code sorta extends itself into your life in other ways too — it’s like an added benefit; now instead of just putting away my clothes, I organize them by color and size.   Any recipes I learned from my parents get added to my Google Docs and become ‘parent classes’ to inherit from later — (nerd humor) when I want to make a meal and don’t want to start from scratch.   I try not to repeat myself in communication.   My favorite show is Big Bang Theory

Haha, in other news – keeping busy with freelance projects.   It’s tough when you mess up, but you just have to push yourself to keep going and make sure you get better and better as time marches on.   It’s almost been 9 months since I left TrafficZoom and started working on my own — really learning code.  It’s been pretty rewarding, and I will continue to keep up the intensity with studying.   I am thinking of going to school too eventually — maybe with all the practice I get from freelancing, I can pay for a masters in CS, which would be pretty nice.

That’s all for now, will continue to update as I have time.   I added some additional links to my Samples page, check em out if you have time – one in particular I like which is the Kanji resource page (for anyone learning Japanese).

Laters!

Vijay

Later this month I’m headed up north to Vancouver.  I’ll be attending the World Hackathon there hosted by Facebook.  It’ll be my 3rd one so far.

I really like Hackathons because you get a chance to put your skills to the test, try out new stuff, meet cool people and learn more about programming/development in general.  I’m really excited for it.

As of late, have been really studying PHP in depth, especially as to where it relates with Content Management Systems (CMSes).   I’ve also been studying Model-View-Controller (MVC) frameworks like Zend, Cake & CodeIgniter.  In ways, a lot of it is similar to iOS and how functions build upon functions to create objects that later can turn into reusable code.  The biggest piece is not to repeat one’s self.   That’s quite a challenge, but thankfully with the help of good books I’ve been able to learn how to refactor a lot of the code I used to write so it’s shorter, cleaner and resuable.   If anything though, I’ve really got the hang of hacking my way around WordPress.  I can build my own themes now, find awesome plugins, modify them, add in JQuery stuff – in the following months – will be updating a lot of the old sites I used to work on (especially this one) so I can showcase my new abilities.

Hopefully all this stuff pays off – as I really want to get to the point where I can have my own websites I build really engage with the people who visit them (ie learn about their interests, present them with content they want, challenge them with games/puzzles, etc).  Learning iOS is cool because you get to be on the very cutting edge of programming in just following stuff that Apple releases.

Concept art – not sure if this is the final look

Am definitely excited for the next iPhone – in a couple more days they’ll be talking about it (September 12th).   I know I’ll be getting an iPhone 5, I missed out on the iPhone 4S, because I was still locked in contract haha.