I was piddling around today, it being a sunday and all, and I started digging into a project I put on the “backburner” just a little bit ago. Only I realized that “just a little bit ago” was around 20 months back – March of 2004. Hmmmm… so maybe more than just a little bit ago.
It was a little web application I was playing with, written in python. I had a baseline setup for it, some unit tests, and I’d even started using it. I’m not sure why I moved away from the project when I did – I can’t remember exactly what happened in March of 2004 that swung me so far away from it. I think maybe that’s when I joined CoCo Communications, and then I lost that summer and following fall pretty darn quickly to the chaos of the startup environment. Yeah, thinking back at it all – that’s just about exactly the timing, so that is undoubtably what pulled me off and away.
The most amusing part of this was going back in and reading all the python code and ideas that I’d scribbled down about it. It is just amazing how much the tools have transformed in the past 20 months. Most of what I’d written was the same thing that everyone wrote with a web application – the object mappings, some quick business logic, and a lot of view/layout stuff. Today I think I could replicate the whole thing in Django in just a couple of days, or try out the same concept with TurboGears or move it into Ruby with Ruby on Rails. So much of the work that I’d really done is now “dealt with” by a Django model, or a Ruby ActiveRecord.
Pretty interesting what 20 months distance puts on the original ideas as well. Definitely a different point of view.
Rhonabwy 