I posted this on LinkedIn in November and am posting it here, backdated, as I’m updating my website, because I think it’s important.

In August, my wife gave birth to our first child. She’s the best. We’re so happy. It’s been a long journey. This isn’t a post about the years it took to get there, but the weeks since.

This post isn’t specifically about Ruby on Rails, but it’s definitely about Ruby on Rails among other things.¹ Rails is a very useful tool to bootstrap an MVC application, and to this day I haven’t encountered an ORM I like better than ActiveRecord, but I want to talk about one facet of Ruby on Rails’ patterns, which stems from the way Ruby works but also shows up in other languages and other tools: “magic.”

If you’ve used Rails, you’re familiar with the magic involved, but briefly: without using any code-generation tools², Rails will create a massive assortment of methods dynamically at runtime based on the names of your models, controllers, and routes. So if you have a simple CRUD setup for your User model, you’ll have things like users_path, user_path(id), new_user_path, etc, and if the User model has_many :posts, then every instance of User will have a posts method to retrieve associated records.

To me, “magic” in coding is any scenario where without explicit declaration, an application seems to “just know” how to behave.

Every November, I say, “This is it – I‘m going to do NaNoWriMo this year.” And every November … I don’t. I’ve got a long-standing project, begun probably nine years ago, called Amazing Science, which I’ve intended to work on during NaNoWriMo for years. And a few years back, I did. But I didn’t get very far – I logged something like 6,000 words that year (the goal is 50,000). Plus, there’s always been the voice in my head telling me that technically, NaNoWriMo is supposed to be spent on the first draft, from word zero, of a new novel. So a project like Amazing Science doesn’t really fit the bill.

This year, I’m going to do it. I should say, I’m doing it. This is my declaration that one way or another, high-quality or low, I’m going to get to 50,000 words on a new novel.

The novel is currently untitled, and for file saving purposes, I’m referring to it as Vuk & Vera. It’s a fantasy story about two twins in a small fishing town. I would tell you more, but I hope that at the end of the month, or a while after, people will actually read it, so I don’t want to say too much. Also: I don’t know too much more at this point. I’ve got some characters, I’ve got some concepts, and as of this morning, with 1,682 words (thanks Scrivener!), I’m doing what it appears those in the biz call “pantsing”.

So, that’s it for now. Here’s the novel on NaNoWriMo, if you’re curious. I’ll probably be procrastinating plenty by griping about it on Twitter, where you can also reach out to me about it if you want.