For the past year or so I've been deluged with questions from friends and co-workers asking me when that darn website of mine will be done. It's done when it's done, alright! Designing a website is one thing, developing one in a new language is another challenge, and being pleased with the overall project itself, well, I'm a stickler detail, so every little thing gets under my skin. I won't even go into my normal speech about making it compatible with Internet Explorer, you may remember that from a previous blog.

For those of you that might not know why people are regularly on my case about finishing this project once and for all, well, I guess it comes down to a few things. First, some people are actually users of the site (e.g., college friends, co-workers, etc.) meaning that when it's done, they will actually use it. Then you have the group of people that enjoy pushing my buttons and seeing if they increase my blood pressure. I typically entertain this type of feedback, so who can blame em. Lastly, you have those who are generally curious as to why it takes a single human being centuries to get this site into production.

Well, for those of you that might not know this site has been technically under development for over a year. So far, all I really have to show for it is the beta design, a blog and music section, and a semi-functional homepage. To clear the air a bit, let me explain something about how much time I really devote to this site.

Throughout the development of this site, I have indeed spent countless hours awake in the middle of the night, probably dropped a few pounds since food is an after thought when coding, and used Photoshop so much that its bits and bytes are bleeding from the sockets. However, with all that said, I don't regularly spend a significant amount of time on it.

In fact, what I have accomplished so far in terms of the different sections of the site was done in small periods of time, each of which I probably didn't leave the house for anything other than work.

Designing the site – Let me see, the design itself was done in Photoshop in about a month where I would wake up, goto work, come home and create graphics. The weekends consisted of, well, pointing and clicking my way to drop shadows, logos, and other images you now see on here.

Blog section – This was probably the hardest section of the site to develop, not because it was a lot of code, but because I wasn't all that acclimated with Ruby on Rails at the time, it was all new to me. I'd say this probably took about 2 weeks of doing nothing but going to work and then coming home to code. Weekends consisted of me, a laptop, Agile Web Development with Rails to my left, Programming Ruby to my right. Heck, I didn't even know what unit, functional, and integration testing were at this point.

Music section – After taking a couple months to physically recover from designing the blog section (hey, I had to gain some weight back right), I moved onto the music section. This went quite a bit smoother. I actually didn't touch the interface until last and focused on doing some test-driven development. I was testing models, writing controllers, and then performing functional tests to make sure everything was copasetic. I probably had this section 90% complete in a week; the other 10% was incorporating functionality I hadn't considered in the original design.

Story section – This is what I'm currently working on. It shouldn't take that long, maybe about 3 weeks total. It's essentially a different version of the blog section with some enhanced functionality. I'll probably also try and re-factor some of the code to make it more DRY.

As you can probably calculate, the duration of time from when I first started this project is significantly different than the actual level of effort I put into this. I have plenty of other things to do instead of coding, it just so happens that every once in a while I get inspired to pickup my laptop, open Textmate, and write a few lines of Ruby.

In terms of lines of code, well, on April 23, 2006, I posted a blog about some of my testing activities. Here's what it looks like now.

Let's look at the stats...

• April 23, 2006
  • 1,066 lines of production code
  • 1,067 lines of test code

• October 8, 2006
  • 2,712 lines of production code
  • 3,433 lines of test code

That's a difference of 4,012 lines of code. April 23, 2006 was 168 days ago. Thus, on average I have been writing 23.88 lines of code per day...not all that much. Heck, my email is more work than that per day.

Don't get me wrong, I put in plenty of late nights and selected a night of hardcore coding over adventures down to the Southside, but hopefully it will be all worth it when this site is done. I actually appreciate all the humor folks find in giving me a hard time about the length of time it's taken me so far. Despite my blood pressure rising while they poke and prod, it also motivates me to get a move on...if not just to make some progress.

My Stack O' Books for Development:

1. Agile Development with Rails
2. Programming Rails
3. Ruby for Rails
4. Rails Recipes
5. Ruby Cookbook
6. The CSS Pocket Reference
7. JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
8. Google, lot's of Google

As you can see, I have my fair share of reference material acquired over time. It seems the longer I wait, the more books that come out for Ruby or Rails. Well, that's about it, the Steelers are playing the Chargers later this evening and I still haven't eaten. However, my excuse this time isn't coding, I was actually working on some apartment fixer uppers.