culann.com

Energy and inspiration

My new job takes a lot of my creative energy; that’s why it took me over three months after I started to get back to blogging. In the last week, though, I’ve had a resurgence of extra-office energy, and I think I can pin the source down to a couple of things that’ve happened:

I decided to play with Wordpress

I started experimenting with Wordpress several weeks ago, and I was immediately struck by how much fun it was to play with. At this point, after customizing and implementing a new design, merging the contents of two separate blogs, and moving an installation from one location to another, I’ve got the same feeling about WP I had about Movable Type when I first installed it. WP, like most good software, jump-starts the creative process.

I installed Ruby and Rails

I’ve been meaning to take a close look at Ruby for months and months now - since before Basecamp hit the scene, even. After reading about the success of Ruby and Rails at Basecamp and its relatives, that intention was solidified. I finally found the time to play a bit late last week (pushed by the beta-distribution of Agile Web Development with Rails)- and I’m hooked. I’m still fumbling my way through the unfamiliar syntax and the goodies that Rails has to offer, but I’ve been able to finish the first iteration (functional, even - I could start using it now if I wanted to) of an application that I’ve been meaning to build for a year in a couple of hours. A framework like this inspires by taking away all the grunt work from implementing an idea.

I started running again

Maybe the biggest increase in my energy has come from returning to something I used to do - running. I sort of fell off the running wagon last year after I got married, and while I managed to fit in a short jog here and there, I never really re-committed to it until a little over a month ago. Since I started back up, though, I’ve felt better and better - and now that I’ve got a goal, I’m even more motivated to keep up this energy-increasing activity.

With all three of these things going my way, I think I’ll be keeping myself in interesting projects for some time to come - and I imagine I’ll be singing the praises of Wordpress, Rails, and running the whole time.