50 Blog Posts I’d Like to See in 2008

A while back, noted social media commentator Chris Brogan published a list of 100 blog posts he’d like to see other people write. The list was meant as a spur in the backside of readers who suffer from Blogger’s Block, a final blow to the excuse that they can’t think of anything to write about. While Brogan’s actual topics were too focused on the incestuously insider world of social media for my taste (“44. The Difference Between Fark and Truemors”), the format was inspiring; I immediately started putting together my own list of posts I’d like to see.

Inevitably, my list reflects my interests and bias just as Brogan’s does his. The posts I’d like to see are largely aimed at people like me: people who picked up Ruby in the last couple of years because of Rails and have got the language and framework pretty handily under control but lack the deep rooting in technical fundamentals and culture that comes from having gone to school for this stuff or having had a long career in it.

The theme is: “I know Ruby. Now what?”

Like Brogan, I’ll ask that if you write on one of these topics link back here or come back to comment so I can find your post and gradually turn this list into something of a directory of this kind of info. Now, without further ado, here’s my list:

1. My First C Extension
2. A Set Theory Primer for Relational Database Users
3. What I Get Out of My Local Ruby Users’ Group
4. All About Postgres Indexes
5. Ruby Was My First Language, Here’s My Second
6. The Five Most Useful Things I Learned in Computer Science
7. My First Contribution to an Open Source Project
8. Participating Actively on Mailing Lists
9. Participating Actively on IRC
10. Understanding and Using Threads
11. Keeping Up to Date with New Developments to the Libraries You Care About
12. How to Write Good API Documentation
13. An Intro to Code Research, Or: Is There A Library for That?
14. An Intro to Queues, Pools, Runners, and Inter-Process Communication
15. Unicode Once and for All
16. Timezones Once and for All
17. How Do Migrations Actually Work?
18. Basic System Administration for Developers
19. Domain-based Programming in Javascript
20. Instrumenting My Rails App
21. Approaches to Processing Large Data Sets
22. A Developer’s Guide to Deployment
23. Bootstrapping Rails Development for the Absolute Beginner
24. Hey Look, I Did Something Useful with LISP!
25. Approaching Your Idols: How to Start Conversations with Gray Beards and Gurus
26. My Painless Gem Integration System
27. Using Your Own Documentation
28. Building a Rails App from Someone Else’s Excel Spreadsheet
29. Useful Ruby Outside of Rails
30. Ruby as PHP Replacement
31. Writing Simple CGI Scripts with Ruby
32. Finding and Fixing Memory Leaks in Rails, Or: Why Are My Mongrels So Big?
33. Writing and Managing Long-Running Processes
34. SMS Integration in Rails
35. What I Learned from Working with Statically Typed Languages
36. My First Profiling Session
37. Big Team Tools and Small Teams, Or: Why Is My Trac Empty?
38. Rules of Thumb for Performant Ruby Code
39. A Survey of Persistence Strategies Beyond Relational Databases
40. Living with a Large Schema
41. My First Cocoa Program
42. Writing and Distributing Rails Apps for Desktop Installation
43. Domain Registration and Hosting for Rails Apps
44. Setting Up Subdomains and Pointing Them at Rails Apps
45. My First Apache Configuration
46. My First Nginx Configuration
47. Is It Worth Releasing?: When to Open Source Your Work
48. An Introduction to GUI Programming
49. Lessons from Java for Someone Who’s Never Written Any
50. Practical Tips for Learning Protocols and Reading Specs

Tagged: ruby, programming, blog, list, education, brogan