I think it’s fairly common for programmers to build applications to meet a personal need. When I found out I was pregnant with our third child this past May I didn’t intend to spend my pregnancy writing a Sinatra application for naming babies, but I’ve had so much fun and have really grown as a programmer by doing so.

At the beginning of the pregnancy I was using a google spreadsheet to create a list of name ideas for the baby that friends and family could add suggestions to. You can view it here. It worked ok for a couple of weeks until I realized it would be nice if people could add comments and share their opinions about each name. I also thought it would be better if people could rate each name so I could see the general popularity of the individual names. I could not find an application that already offered this service in a simple, straightforward way.

For anyone that’s ever had the experience of expecting a baby, they’ve gone through the process of trying to come up with names, receiving lots input from friends and family, and probably felt overwhelmed at trying to keep track of all the great (and not so great) ideas. Thus, I figured this must be a solved problem, yet, I couldn’t find a nice, simple solution for it. Alas, NamingTogether.com was born!

From the start I wanted this to be incredibly simple; the expectant mother or couple goes through a very minimal signup process; with just a few graces of your fingers across the keyboard you’re ready to go with your own name list and a unique link to provide to anyone that you want input from. I wanted the user’s friends and family to be able to add name ideas, leave comments, and rate names without having to login to the site or go through any nonsense.

Simple interface for adding and rating names

I decided to use Sinatra for this application. Previously, I had only coded a few small projects in Ruby and had not learned Rails or Sinatra yet. I figured that since the application was going to be rather small and succinct, Sinatra would be a good fit. As Adam and I delved deeper into the development process we discovered that using Rails would have made our lives a lot easier, but we stuck with Sinatra nonetheless. We’ll be working on a really thorough post about the development process very soon, and we’ll cover the challenges we faced using Sinatra on this project.

I spent the first several weeks learning Sinatra and DataMapper and writing some very basic functionality, and when my demands for the application far outgrew my knowledge-base I turned to Adam for assistance. He really helped to pull the application together. He hadn’t played with Sinatra before either, so he got to learn something new by working on Naming Together.

Being married to a programmer certainly has its benefits; after our two kids are put to bed in the evening, we get to sit down together on the couch with our laptops and hack away at things together. Adam has always been a great teacher, so the craftsman and apprentice relationship works out really well for us. I have great memories of late night programming sessions together during the last several months.

This experience has enlightened me on the process of working with other people on a project, creating tickets, closing tickets, and holding myself accountable to get things done when I commit to them. I also have a more thorough understanding of git, and even got to use Heroku for this project.  I would not have gained this level of understanding in Ruby and Sinatra without working on an application that truly benefited me in some way.

As a stay at home mom to two young children, at the end of the day, I often have very little energy and motivation to hack away at random projects or to push myself to learn something new. And since I don’t program professionally, I don’t get that working experience that really helps new programmers to become great programmers. Working on this application was what pushed me to keep learning new things and to become a better programmer. I was so excited for the kids to fall asleep each night just so I could implement some new functionality, or look at Adam’s commits from the night before to make sure I understood what he had implemented.

Choosing a name for the application was also a pretty fun process. I had a textmate doc filled with random words, phrases or ideas that came to me throughout the process of writing this application. One day as I was staring blankly at the document, feeling rather hopeless about coming up with the perfect name, I asked myself for the hundredth time, “What is this application really about, at its core?” All of a sudden, the name just dawned on me as I answered, “It’s about naming our babies, together.”

After months of evening coding sessions, the application is now live and ready to be hammered on. I’ve got some open issues that we’re going to be working on soon, like pagination, options for sorting names, option for parents to veto names altogether, etc. I would love feedback about the application, as this is going to be something that I’m going to maintain and support, even after a name is decided for our own baby bundle, due this December.

Before I became a parent I had a wonderful life that was all about me. I sought out fun and oh, the fun I had! I played board games, LOTS of video games, I drank beverages that actually had alcohol content, I danced around pagan fires in the dead of winter, and I had a habit of seeing live music. I read books! I planted flower gardens! I organized events! I had friends and we read each other’s tarot cards, we made herbal teas, and we traveled to fun places! I didn’t have a blog, I didn’t email much, and I certainly would not have had a use for Twitter, had it been around back then.

See, I even had time to color my hair and wear jewelry!

But that’s not my life anymore. Now I wake up early each day and I get my kids dressed. I try to feed them balanced meals throughout the day; we play with peg boards and make puzzles, we read stories, we dance in circles as we sing nursery rhymes, we paint, we color, we cook, we drive places, we do housework! It’s a much different life than I had before, but it’s an awesome life that I wouldn’t change.  I cherish every moment with my kids. In fact, I often get dreary eyed as I think about how empty my lap will feel when there are no kids to fill it, and how empty my home will be when there are no laughing voices filling its space. My friend Bryan shared something with me that his grampa told him before he passed away years ago: “I’d rather be up all night long hearing the voices of children than sitting alone in an empty, clean home.” I share that philosophy completely. 

Being a mommy is a crazy kind of fun!

I am trying to integrate some of my past hobbies into my new “adult” life as I search for balance as a mother and a regular humanoid. But what I keep finding is a lack of commonality between myself and others around me. I’ll find a super cool geek that doesn’t have kids, or find someone that has kids but the similarities end there. 

Of course I have grown in many ways since those days have come and gone. I’m not sure I’d get as much pleasure now from spending 100 hours of my time leveling up an Amazon in Diablo II. But there are more simple and similar pleasures like playing geeky board games and learning Ruby. Adam and I like to play Munchkin, Carcassonne, and Settlers of Catan pretty regularly. But those games are tough to play without more players. Our evenings together usually consist of programming on the couch together, listening to DJ Tiesto, or sitting out on the back porch on summer nights staring up at the stars above us, dreaming about life. 

Renae rocking out at Catan

We used to have a couple of friends with pretty common interests that we hung out with regularly. But now that I’m a parent and we’re in the middle of Maine, I can’t seem to find many friends in our area that enjoy gaming and geeking out. There’s more to me than coding and gaming, of course; I love watching independent films, Japanese films, anime, and laughing at the horrible videos on break.com. I like listening to different types of music. I care about sustainability and where my food and products come from. And I love coffee! Tell that to anyone in Maine and you’ll get this response “OMG, I LOVE coffee too!!! I go to Dunkin Donuts three times a day!”; to which I respond, “Ahhh….”; next topic. Being a pagan means I’m pretty drawn to the earth and her cycles, and I love celebrating the seasons and the natural rhythms of the earth. 

So, it’s pretty hard for me to find friends with common interests. Which is why most of my free time is spent in my dining room learning Ruby after the kids are in bed or reading Twitter! Adam asked me last week, “Why are you so addicted to Twitter?” Well, as a stay at home mommy without many local friends, it’s my only source of social interaction with people that are professionals, geeks, and parents. Today, I’ve been able to read about @MikeG1 griping about date parsing, @gilesgoatboy wishing he had more video games to play, and saw a picture of @SummerTulip’s piggie pancakes she made for her son. It’s this great eclectic mix of humans that I love to spy on because they are each like myself in some small way. It makes me feel connected to something that is like myself. The sum of twitter’s parts add up to a nice online friend. It sounds sad, but it can be hard to connect to anything in Auburn, Maine without getting the_hiv.

I know that my Twitter addiction needs to end someday. I spy an intervention sooner or later. But for now I’ll keep enjoying reading about the experiences of my twitter-folk friends and sharing my experiences with them. Twitter fills a niche in my life right now, and I’m thankful to be able to draw on a hand-selected community for wisdom, giggles, and inspiration!

I think I feel too much. Maybe I spend too much time on reddit.com. Maybe I’m just cursed by being an Aquarian. Or perhaps I am just human. But how can I be human and share my humanity with people like these terrorists in Mumbai? How can my life be filled with love, hope and beauty while so many lives are void of all those things? Where is the disconnect, the great divide? 

I just spent the last 20 minutes looking at these photos from Mumbai; I’ve been moved to tears many times by human tragedy so I wasn’t surprised to find myself a complete wreck after looking at these. I am an incredibly soft humanitarian and I feel the pain in the world every day. I carry it with me like an emo 14 year old myspace addict. When I look at my own children smiling I can’t help but remind myself that there are children just as beautiful as my own that are crying, being beaten, raped, or neglected at that very moment. When I go to the store to buy groceries I think about all of the families out there that don’t have money to buy groceries to feed their children. When I walk outside on a cold Maine winter evening and feel the icy air rip through my bones I feel sad for the people that don’t have a way to escape that cold, no homes to keep them warm. When I buy clothes for my kids at a department store I think about the tiny, fragile hands that made the clothes for only a few cents a day. I think about how my own country has destroyed the natural environment and economic structure of third world nations so that we could pay as little as $3.99 for a shirt at walmart when in the real world you couldn’t even buy a yard of fabric for that little money and make it yourself. 

My husband thinks I’m totally nuts. I drive myself insane because I can’t rationalize all of the chaos out there and I can’t find a way to contribute to the solution. He reminds me gently that I am contributing my raising two children with so much love and patience because someday they will inherit this world. He is right, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about the horrific things that are happening.

And as everything falls apart, as our humanity frays at its seams, the American consumer just goes right on consuming. They run in their hamster wheels and their scenery never changes because they refuse to look beyond their own borders and their own fabricated reality. We are losing our civilized world. We are falling victim to the savagery that is born through hateful dogma, consumerism, and our lack of presence within our children’s lives.

We work so much because we need to pay bills. We need to pay bills because we have been made to feel as though we “need” certain things like two cars per household, lots of name brand clothes, the newest technologies, new furniture, candle sconces, new coordinating bath rugs and shower curtains, on and on. We need these things because the TV tells us we need them. Our neighbors have them. Our friends have them. We must have them. We must assimilate. So we consume. And it never ends. We’re never happy. We are slaves to jobs that most of us hate and we work to pay for things that we turn around and sell in a lawn sale at 10% of its original price a year later. In the meantime, we’ve left our homes empty. Our children are forgotten. And when we are not there to nourish them emotionally and provide a stable foundation of love and support they turn to TV, computer games, myspace communities, and other forms of support and get lost in the confusing web of unattached support systems. 

I am overburdened by the sadness in the world. I cannot understand hatred because I’ve never truly felt it. I just want peace, understanding, diversity, and acceptance. I want that for all of us. Isn’t the need to love and be loved a part of all of us? When I sit quietly in the rocking chair as I nurse my baby boy, my thoughts wander. Many times I have looked into his dark, dreamy eyes and wondered how anyone could not love a child like I love my own. And I wonder how anyone that is this loved could ever grow up to do so much damage later in life. I don’t think they could. I think that love and peace must start between a mother and her child, and then blossom from there. I can’t think of any better way to cleanse the world of hatred than to hold our sweet children close to us, rock them gently, and allow ourselves to love them with every cell in our body.

So here’s the deal. My most fervent desire for my children and their future is that they are able to retain a healthy curiosity, a penchant for questioning authority, and the natural ability to be remarkable. I want them to be innovators, to be great thinkers. Therefore, I refuse to put them on the assembly line, which is the government-run education system in America.

Our education system is socialized daycare. My husband and I made incredible changes in our professional and financial lives before our daughter was born so that I was able to stay home and raise her myself rather than send her off to daycare. At a time when it was not popular for families to survive on single incomes we made it happen because we decided early on where our values were. So, we live with one car, we don’t have credit cards, we trimmed off the frivolous and $$ niceties so that we could bring into existence the life we dreamed of for our family. We did not want this precious new life to find itself surrounded by strange caregivers, limited emotional experiences, and stagnant environments. We didn’t want her earliest memories to be of Miss Debbie at Debbie Doo’s Daycare. Based on those principles that were the catalyst for so many changes in our lives, why then would we send her off to daycare under an educational pretext when she turns 5 years old?

As John Gatto points out in his book, “Dumbing Us Down,” our school system is good at one thing: it schools our children. It teaches them to follow orders. It teaches them to be timely. It does not, however, educate them. Enclosing children within a solid structure for 12 years of their lives, limiting their interactions to children of the exact same age, and impressing upon them that the only way they can “learn” anything is by listening to a teacher is absolutely absurd and intellectually heretical. Socrates would be pissed.

Is school really an assembly line? Well lets zoom in:

Young Gwen is sitting her math class working through a problem that she has been struggling with. She has been persisting though, and she feels as though she is making progress. Just as she starts to feel confident in her ability to solve this problem the school bell rings. Does Gwen remain in her seat to finish the problem? Of course not. Gwen has to shuffle out of the room, proceed down the hall and assimilate herself into the next classroom to memorize more useless facts that she’ll forget in less than 10 years. What is Gwen learning? That it never mattered to anyone else if she solved that math problem. Sure, it mattered to her. But what matters to her is not important. What is important is following that assembly line. Move on through. Don’t ask questions. Never seek. Just move on through.

When Gwen is 18 years old she might go to college. I hope she does. She might find herself in some interesting classes where her professors will encourage her to think for herself and solve problems in creative ways. Hopefully it will undo some of the damage that public school inflicted on her well-being for 12 very influential years of her life.

Realistically, Gwen probably won’t go to college. The burning desire to achieve, to create, and to think will have been replaced with pure apathy. She’ll assimilate into the 9-5 workforce that keeps this great consumerist economy rollin’. And our government will love her for it. They’ll show their love by requiring her to fill out W4 forms annually and using her taxes to grant large tax breaks to CEO’s of oil companies. The Federal Reserve will love her because she’ll live a long, unfulfilling life on credit. She’ll live outside her means because that’s what we are all encouraged to do, and she’ll always be in debt to a system that is designed to keep her that way.

For all of these reasons, and so many  more, I choose homeschooling for my children. I value their right to a meaningful, thoughtful existence. I understand the value in being on the fringe. On the educational fringe I can offer unique opportunities for learning for my kids. I can help them learn that the best teacher they will ever find is in fact, themselves. The ability to go out and teach yourself something on your own accord, is in my opinion the most beneficial thing a person could ever learn. In kindergarten my child would be asked to build a bridge with their blocks.  At home I can supply the blocks and then step back; the beauty comes in observing what their own curiosities will direct them build with the blocks. As an unschooling parent I will provide a landscape of potentials and be a nurturing guide.

If you want to know why mainstream is not where you want to be, I’ll tell you why: It’s not progressive, and it’s mediocre. It runs in shallow cycles, regurgitating meaningless and often harmful trends throughout hundreds and thousands of years. If you want an example, check out the girls wearing leg warmers over their jeans as they walk down your street tomorrow morning. It’s the 80’s in 2008. A more harmful trend? Check out this video and then watch and wait for Sarah Palin’s church to repopularize the witch hunts again. Sarah Palin needs protection from witches

Is it kooky to homeschool? According to most people on the assembly line it is. But, you can feel bad for them later. It’s ok to be on the fringe. Once you get used to it you’ll feel quite “normal” there. Living on the fringe requires using concerned analysis in your decision making process for anything that matters from education, spirituality, envinronmental concerns, your profession, your hobbies. It’s about abandoning the main road and creating a new path to the things that matter most to you. Allow yourself to think. It can be frightening, but I think you’ll agree that is the most exhiliarating and freeing experience you can create for yourself.