I Am Still Alive

I am officially relocating to San Francisco on Monday and got a jump on the move by planning out my new apartment (at 20th & Dolores) with Google’s SketchUp. I pretty much do this every time I move into a new apartment/office (which admittedly is rare) or do any renovation.

It end up downloading and firing up the newest trial of SketchUp about once every two or three years. It’s usually nice to see how the app has changed over that period. SketchUp is largely responsible for my first introduction to Ruby (and actually any kind of programming). Years back, when I was in my senior year at Wesleyan, I wanted to model some woodworking projects before building them and tried to do it in SketchUp. The UI then was really tedious to use, but it had a Ruby console that let me model the projects programmatically. That console was powerful and I got really into Ruby. Gosh, about a two years later Rails came across the wire as I was starting to do a lot more web development. That must have been late 2004 or early 2005. Tak built the first incarnation of the web store at I Am Still Alive around that time and he wanted to try Rails out. I started tinkering with Rails at about the same time as we were working through the code for the store and have been developing in one Ruby framework or another pretty much exclusively since.

That being said, SketchUp’s interface has in the intervening years become much, much easier to use. The model below took all of fourty minutes to put together using the console, the UI and the components library. It also got me stoked for the move.