Nicholas Van Weerdenburg wrote:

> For writing, I wrote a jnl.rb that creates a journal entry template with 
> today's date and then opens it in vi.   That's slowly extending into a 
> PIM, with parseopts for command line parsing and options for using 
> different editors, adding an entry from the command line (--entry "blah 
> blah blah"), and so on. I think this would be a good learning program as 
> well.

I wrote something like that for myself on a recent contact job.  I 
wanted a way to track little issues as they came and went, so that I 
could go back and see how much time was wasted dealing with WebLogic and 
assorted J2EE issues.  I needed some way to just tap out notes at the 
command line, with date and time stamps in the text.

What makes something like that a good starting point for a newbie is 
that it's simple but it offers some immediate practical value, and, once 
it's working, features can gradually be added.

And when the features get out of control, one can learn refactoring, too.


James