Last fall, David Bock hosted a Rails for Newbies group which excelled my learning. Inspired by the pace of learning with others, mentorship, and Hungry Academy - Scrappy Academy was born (thanks @tourdedave for the name!). It is a community of people learning Ruby and Rails.

I have said a lot about what I am going to do on my blog and if you haven’t noticed yet, I am not doing those things. Sure I have been busy doing many other things, but what about these things. Then I read this by Derek Sivers. Take a minute to read it.

If your still here, in light of this, no more announcing plans. Besides, I have always enjoyed writing and reading about what has been done.

I am going on a making diet. I started using twitter and blogs heavily about three years ago. In that time, I have learned an incredible amount by watching, listening, and reading. I have benefited greatly from all of the people I have met and the materials people have created. However, I find myself with too little time to get things done and still spending a lot of time looking through my Twitter feed, reading news letters, browsing through interesting ads delivered to my inbox, and etc. I really want to be making things! I want to be writing code, becoming a better writer, teaching others how to learn Ruby, writing Rails applications, writing node.js applications, and etc. I am consuming more than I am making. Because of my behavior, I am afraid I am at risk for joining the waiting crowd from Dr. Suess’s “Oh, the places You’ll Go!”. Terrifying.

In the past, I have “hidden” files that contain passwords in strange ways such as placing them in text files named “Personal Journal” or “Recipe List”. I ask myself, really? And how do you think that would help you if anyone ever did gain access to your file system? Today, I fixed my naive approach to securing data.

About two years ago I was introduced to the world of programming and Ruby. At the time I was helping friends at a startup with customer support for a product that they were building. Out of curiosity I started reading up on what they were doing. I was fascinated. I don’t have a formal education in technology. Most of everything I know today has come from community and (mostly free) online resources.