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Improvement Ravine, over at Martin Fowler’s blog, has one of the clearest examples I know of for plateau-breaking in mastery of a skill.

I love reading about things like this - experiencing it, as the example describes, can be a little less joyful, though having experienced it is a wonderful thing (i.e., it’s not fun while you’re taking the step back, but once you’re over the ravine and back on the improvement track, you’re glad to be there).

I think it’s important to realize that we run into plateaus in pretty much everything we do - from technical skills, to losing weight, to being in a relationship. The tricky thing is to be self-aware enough to recognize that you’re on a plateau, and lucky or clever enough to devise a strategy to get through it.

Wow. Just wow.

I sort of abandoned this blog a while back - I lost all the momentum that once carried me through posting on technical subjects (work was eating that aspect of my creative energy), on running (which I stopped, for a time), and on everything else. Once you fall out of the habit, you’re out.

I’ve still used this site occasionally to test out some things for work, but other than that, it’s been the least of my concerns.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened up the ol’ site a couple of days ago and saw that my last real post was on October 17th, 2005. It doesn’t feel like I’ve been away from blogging that long, but there’s the cold, incontrovertible truth. I don’t particularly like that I’ve taken just over a year off from the blog.

So, as I’ve done so often before and will surely do again, I’m saying I’m back. I can’t (or more accurately, won’t, for fear of making commitments I’m so clearly bad at keeping) guarantee any frequency of posts, but I will guarantee that I’ll make an effort to post things here, whether it’s a quick writeup of my still-infrequent jogs, a picture of our dog, or a short article on the coolest thing I’ve found out about Ruby on Rails.

You can return to your regularly-scheduled programming now.

Hey April Anne - thanks for checking up on me

I’m still around. I’ve been a little distracted over the last six weeks or so - first with the super-secret project (more on that in a moment) that I referred to a couple of posts ago, and with a fairly big personal issue. Lacie had surgery about a month ago and spent several weeks recuperating at home, so between that and work my waking hours have been fairly filled. Happily, Lacie’s doing quite well now (she went back to work last Wednesday).

As for the project at work… well, it’s no longer secret. Viget is building Seth Godin’s latest project, Squidoo (press release). I’d explain what the project itself is, but if you’re interested you’d be better served just to download Godin’s (short) e-book on the subject, Everyone’s an Expert (on something).

Anyways, I’m the lead developer on the project, and for the first three and a half weeks or so I was the only developer on it. Since then, Squidoo’s hired their Chief Engineer and we’ve brought another developer on board, which has helped to spread the worldoad around a bit. Nevertheless, I’ve still been spending some insane hours on this project - and never moreso than in the past week. We’ve been working to two-week iterations, so we’ve delivered substantial amounts of code every other Tuesday for a while now, the last of which was Oct 11th. The weekend of the 9th, then, I was workin’ hard to get the iteration finished off.

And then there was this week - we found out at the beginning of the month that Squidoo wanted to launch their beta today, October 17th. Given that we hadn’t been planning on opening a beta for another iteration or two at a minimum, this was a bit of a surprise - but with a ton of effort from everyone involved, we were able to get things up and running (though far from flawlessly) today.

Unfortunately, the aforementioned ‘ton of effort’ from me involved working til 1am Saturday morning, from midnight to 2am Sunday morning, and until 3am Monday morning, followed by getting back into the office just five hours later. It’s been a long, hard week and a half… and despite the various obstacles we’ve run up against, it’s all been worth it. I love this project, I love the work, and I love the challenge.

All of that’s to say that I’ve run a grand total of 5 miles in the last month. I was so happy to get out of the office today at 5:30pm that I went for a quick mile-and-a-half in the cool autumn air. I’m hoping to be able to make more time to run in the months to come; I’ve missed it, and it would certainly help me unwind after the inevitable stress to come, so we’ll see.

And one more semi-aside: I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s blogs over the past six weeks. Even though I’ve been away, I’ve been following the RBF and the web world as diligently as ever. For all the good things that’ve happened, congrats, and for all the bad things, my sympathies. I look forward to reconnecting with people in the weeks to come.