Memoirs of an English Major

    I’m somewhat of an oddity and because of this, I wear many creative hats. Some weeks, my thoughts are purely on writing, as was the case in the previous weeks. The ideas just flowed from my head right across my keyboard. Every sentence felt like pure gold and nothing was beyond my grasp. At the end of the week, I had a whole slew of stories planned, plotted, and even more ideas planned. However, this week the ideas seemed to slow slightly. Perhaps I am a little written out or am suffering from a slight case of writers block. Most writers take a break from their work and relax. What do I do? Much like the oddity I am, I let my other passion take over and see where that takes me. That my friends is my programming side. Allow me to elaborate as to why

   Well before I was an English major, years before I would enter college, I was a typical computer nerd. I’ve always speculated what would happen if I ever talked to my younger self. When I was in middle school, I couldn’t even fathom being anything else but a computer degree or sorts, let alone an English degree. It just wasn’t what I had planned. I was the type of kid when others were playing sports I was building cities in Sim City 2000 for a competition, scripting in Sphere server for the player run Ultima Online server, or entering programming competitions in Pascal. In any case, I wasn’t the man I am now. Ever since those years, I have always had a passion for computers in some regard and these days and I always make it a case to stay as connected to the world of computing in as best of a capacity as I can. In previous years, it was in emulation and ROM hacking, and years prior, it was in audio and image editing. These days, my efforts are in the web sector in things like Ruby on Rails, PHP, and HTML.

    For the past week, I’ve doubled my efforts of learning the Ruby programming language. I’m not only doing this to keep my programming skill fresh, but also to help in speeding up my understanding of the Rails framework.

   Ruby is a great programming language and if I ever teach programming in the future, the class would be on Ruby. It’s possibly the cleanest code I have written in years, almost poetic in nature. The concepts of the language is one of harmony and allowing the code to be self documenting as best as possible and I am loving it.

    It’s fun to switch my hat at times and to explore any avenue of creativity that I have. It helps work out my mind and allows me to see the world in a different way, allowing me to connect with that other side of my persona. It’s amazing when you start to look at what other creative areas you have.

   So, how do you work through writers block? Do you stop and take in life or explore other creative avenues? I’d love to hear if any other writers/English majors our there also code in their spare time.