Not much went on this week.  I’ve been hobbled a bit (pardon the pun) by my recent ax injury.  Working from home agrees with me, though.

I’ve gotten everything building on our build server, deployments made to our client machine, etc.  From here on out, it’s just iterative refinements.  I’m very pleasantly surprised by the performance improvements we’ve achieved.   Thanks merely to a few design choices, we’ve got things that used to take 5 minutes happening in seconds.  Lots of this improvement is due to our removing all the string manipulation and business logic from the database.  We now deliver all of the data that the client is entitled to down the wire and let the client’s pc do all of the manipulation needed.  Our clients can scale their hardware to the perfomance needs that they have.

My new hire showed up – he seems bright and eager to work.  I’ve got high hopes for him.

So far I’ve gotten through the tutorial section of Agile Web Development with Rails and am plowing through the active record sections.  I’m feeling like I should start playing around with a sample project.  Time to dust off the dive website idea and start implementing.  I’ve also finished this week reading Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby and started reading an online copy of the Pickaxe.

I think that next week I’m coming up on a month straight of no meat. I really need to nail down the last time I ate it.

Spanish: No progress.  I’ve been naughty and haven’t done any learning there.  I’ll need to put the easy spanish reader back in my bag to finish.  Also, start trying to do simple conversations at work.  Because I’m used to having the gift of gab, I get easily embarassed by not knowing how to say things. Too bad, I need to crawl so I can walk.

Next week, projects at work begin simple end to end testing and integration testing with other systems.  We have to train up our new guy, get auto upgrading working, get the build server to make our install package.  We also need to refactor a bit to treat the UI of Excel 2007 differently from the UI of Excel 2005, though I don’t know if we will get to that for next week.  Learn some spanish.  Buy a domain for my dive website.