This morning, I was watching the Rails 8 keynote. I'm not a Ruby developer, it's not for me. I don't think that should invalidate the ideas they are pursuing. I like how they've decided to challenge the norms. Especially that I've been seeing others including me suggesting things without even considering the alternatives. But I like the ethos of not being afraid of re-inventing some wheels. As a programmer, I enjoy understanding how things work, for it's own sake. My favorite quote from the keynote was, "AWS has convinced developers that they should be afraid of computers (servers)" Which made me laugh out loud, because it's true and the irony is not lost on me. I'm one of those people, but my reasons were not fear, as I have been using Linux for the past four years or so. But more born out of laziness to take the time to understand the process of getting a server to respond to requests from the Internet. I'd like to remedy that, especially since I use Go as my main programming language. I can do all of that with Go. That's what I intend to explore. Yesterday, I tried out Turso (sqlite). It was crazy how easy it was to get a database running on the cloud. I plan on exploring some interesting ideas it gave me. That is the point for me, to be excited about programming.
The next re-inventions
There are a few things I want to get good at straight away:
- Programmatically get servers running with the bare minimum of information like an IP. I intend to use the Rails stuff as inspiration.
- Rolling out my own authentication, I've been telling myself that I should not hand roll this. I would like to at the very least try and understand how to do it right.
- A vertically auto scaling server. I'm quite a big fan of vertical scaling, as it lets you make the most of modern programming languages, caching etc.
- More Sqlite
These things make me excited. Recently I've been understanding how to get SSH apps running on a server. The concepts are not hard to grasp. They are worth exploring. My goal is to be a master of my craft. I cannot do that, unless I explore the difficult stuff.
You do you
I don't mind if this ends up being a dead end, I would have at least understood why. Rather than parroting what everyone else seems to think. The past year, I've been forcing myself to think for myself. Sometimes it means, to follow your bliss, despite the consensus. It's also one of my favorite aspects of programming. You don't need anyones permission to try any of these things out. You will always face the consequences of your actions alone, at the very least I want to the consequences to be the cause of my decisions. I'm not under any false pretenses either. I know I'm not very good at this, I also know that if I try, I can figure it out. So that's what I will do.
Happy exploring.
P.S. Thank you to the people at Rails for the inspiration. You can watch the keynote, here.