Learning (and Re-Learning) skills

I spent the weekend working on a new personal web app for myself. It's going to be a recipe repository / meal planner / shopping assistant. I know, big plans.

To do this, I'm digging back into asp.net, C#, and SQL. I have not touched any of this stuff in well over a year, since I left MVI. It took me 3 days to work through a page that lets me enter a new recipe name and tag it with a meal type (dinner, breakfast, snack, etc.) However, I feel like I accomplished something major. I completely set up a SQL database, a .net server, and I was able to tie it together with code that I hope is not to horrible.

I remember some of the practices that my former co-workers and good friends taught me, but actually putting it into my code and doing it right is a different story. I hope to learn some of that again over the course of this project, and really build up my skill set to something approaching total world domination.

I'll hopefully be giving a talk at a user group meeting in a few months that my buddy runs. It'll be about coding HTML with good structure, and how to use the power of CSS to really make a website kick ass. I'll let you know more about it as I go. I'll be posting my thoughts and some samples up here as I work on it.

Oh, and you can read our wedding blog over at http://kristiandjosh.wordpress.com/. I gotta update that too.