Learning something new can be hard

Even though I have been working in software development for over 30 years, it can still be hard to learn new things. You start on a tutorial, then find you have the wrong version of something, then discover that you need to install a development kit, only to find that there is still something not working. Sigh…

Example 1: I spent some time playing with RSS Cloud recently. I was trying to access the RSS Cloud server from my shared hosting webhost, but I was unsuccessful. I was able to access it from a second cloud server. Eventually, I found out that I could not access ports above 1000 from my shared hosting. Ugh.

Example 2: I was trying to export some old WordPress websites and render them as static websites using Jekyll. However, I could not use one of the standard converters because I did not have a Ruby development kit installed. I then tried several others and finally worked around this, but I am still not there yet.  Ugh ugh.

Example 3: I have recently been following the work of Melody Kramer and the 18F team at the GSA. I thought I would take a shot a cloning a repo from their Github site and trying to rebuild the repo using Jekyll, but ran into a number of tool issues (please note I am not blaming the 18F team!). Ugh ugh ugh.

Takeaways: Nobody ever said software development was easy, sometimes you just have to keep digging…and maybe backing up and taking smaller steps.

Thanks for listening…