Frustrations on having the world change under you.

The last 6 months have been a blur. I've:

adopted css

learned ruby

decided I really *hate* perl, despite having big one of it's largest supporters in the past

become obsessed with rubyonrails

learned design (by following 37signals websites across the net, among others).

I'm tired! And my brain is somewhat fried. I've lost some of my confidence I had before, but I'm very confident that things are moving in the right direction. Having so much change so fast is difficult (i.e. I really thought THAT code was BEAUTIFUL before? Argh!)

And I'm realizing that none of these things I've learned are a silver bullet (to pull a term from the Mythical Man Month). Designing a complex site is still a pain in the butt. And 'porting' code I've written over the last 5 years is a huge, painful project.

Still, I'm excited for the future. I just need to catch my breath, and not be so hard on myself when things take longer than I want. Optimism can be a curse when you end up pushing yourself too hard!