In August of 2005 I began writing a blog in which I mostly discussed the Ruby on Rails development that I was doing but more than occasionally I drifted off topic. In early 2006, two major events happened. First, I was approached by Addison-Wesley to write a book about Ruby on Rails. While I was excited about the prospect, I struggled with what spin my book would take- what would make my book different and more interesting than other Rails books? Unfortunately, it was during that time that my dog Maximus was diagnosed with Canine Lymphoma, puppy cancer. I took a few months to spend with Maximus and while he was still healthy I was mountain biking with him nearly every day. That was basically the end of my blog - I posted only one more message when Maximus passed away.

Things got better, though and it was then that I thought of a way to write a different kind of Ruby on Rails book. Most programming books teach concepts through a series of small example applications that aren't connected. That's fine, but doing so leaves it up to the reader to extrapolate what they've learned in the book in order to build a larger application with many interconnected components. So, I decided that my book would cover the creation of one web site from start to finish and I only had to figure out what kind of web site that would be. It would have to be something that could be simple enough for beginners yet complex enough so that many Rails concepts would be covered in the book. Since I had experience building community web sites at ArsDigita and sites like MySpace were "all the rage" I decided the book would be about building a social networking website with Ruby on Rails. I recruited a friend from Caltech, Michael Hartl, to be my co-author (he's the smart one) and the rest of the year has been dedicated to writing that book. We should be done soon and I look forward to doing a lot of different things this year. And, I promise I'll blog more often!