1st March, 2010, Hamburg, Germany. So, I have decided to take upon myself a year of bettering myself somehow with regards to ruby and rails. So each day of the week, until 28th February 2011, I will spend at least 1 hour (or at least that is the plan) to do something. Whether that be to code something, read up on something, fix some sort of bug, blog about something, anything that means that I am improving/learning/contributing in someway. So to that end I actually started two days ago. I ported my (what was) sinatra app to rails 3, changed to using devise as a authentication/authorization gem (although cancan seems  to me to be better at authorization so I will be using that if I can), decided that I would test using testunit/matchy/rr/shoulda, then I started using the better_logging plugin for rails, which breaks on rails 3, so I fixed it here and sent a pull request on github. All in all a pretty productive weekend. But I have a feast of things that I working on at the moment. Let me see if I can give a quick run down on what will be keeping me busy.

• I forked the mailr webmail client so that I can rails 3 it and make it look nice and continue to improve it
• I have decided to use vim as a my text editor/ide of choice, so I will be writing some scripts for it in ruby, to make day to day things easier to do, all my vim file are here
• Along with the mailr project I will also be creating a more flexible contacts app for it
• Also I will be finishing my small but extremely long running (in development terms) self productivity app.
• Ahhh, and not to forget my rails blog posts that I have not gotten around to writing yet.

Anyway, that is at least a few things that will keep me occupied, focused and improving over the next few months. I am always having new ideas, and I already have an ideas backlog to work through that I haven’t detailed in this post. So I am in no doubt that I will have a host of things to do this year. And you never know, I may even finish something this year. Now that would be good. You can follow my public exploits here on github , and I guess you can read here about my not so public ones. But for minor updates I think I will just use twitter .