Asymptomatic

“Martin, did you ever play basketball?”

“Yes.”

Last Saturday, Riley and I took our car to compete at Cub Pack 32's pinewood derby race, placing 2nd among the 33 racers submitting cars.

Last year's car didn't make it out of the shaping phase.  We got the car down to the shape and added weight, but I forgot to weigh it with the wheels.  When I tried to take some wood out of the center with a rotary saw, it went haywire, taking out way too much wood, extremely weakening the car frame, and still coming out overweight.  We had to bow out of the race.  But not this year.

There's a handful of good programs on "TV" these days.  Berta and I have been enjoying House of Cards, True Detectives, and The Walking Dead, for example.  Game of Thrones is soon to return to the screen, and we watched the first episode of Black Sails last night, which wasn't bad.  But none of these shows are appropriate for our kids, aged 9 and 12.

Well, that's not completely true.  There are shows that are designed for 9 or 12-year-olds.  But those shows are of no interest to Berta or me.  They're all trite and lack complexity.  And I'm not against cartoons, but it would be nice to watch something together that's not a cartoon.

It happens every year in cub scouts - the dreaded pinewood derby race.  As a parent with virtually no woodworking experience outside of junior-high wood shop, any competence at making a non-catastrophic - much less competitive - pinewood derby car is non-existent.

Let's get this paragraph out of the way: The race is not by the boys.  This is the reality.  The dads build and race their cars.  No cub scout should be using the power tools that are required to build these cars.  The parts that are left for them to be involved in are sanding, painting, and car design.  Without supervision and direct guidance, the kids will likely hate their results when compared to the cars produced by other kids' dads.

Hear me out. I'm a UX designer by trade; while not a developer, I do understand software and technology very well. I spend a lot of time testing and tinkering with ideas by trying to hack them together the best I can. My goal is to build a small but real feeling version of my idea to understand and test if there's actually value. I continually hit the wall or spend hours getting caught up on something trivial (I understand this is part of the learning process). Like for most people, time is an issue for me and I'm really looking for something to help me prototype quickly. I consider Ruby and Python too big for that (am I wrong)? What should I focus on, a Javascript framework, just jQuery, something like Haskell, etc.? 

First, it's admirable to want to learn something new.  Programming is a tough discipline to master.  In spite of every startup CEO telling you they themselves coded their launch project, and that you should just learn to code it all yourself, this is not a practical approach.  The statistic we don't have is how many of those startups continue to be a success without having their code re-written by competent programmers.