I seem to be writing a lot of “first impressions” posts lately, and I’ve definitely been using several new tools recently. Its fun and strange at the same time; I am doing a lot of learning, which is fun and horizon expanding, but I am also coding less as a result, and because my knowledge of these new tools is necessarily superficial as a newbie, I know that the code I am writing is probably not very good. This week, I started gathering requirements on a project that I initially expected to be coding in JRuby on Rails, only to find out that eventually, I would be handing off the application to a development group that only wanted to support PHP. OK, I thought, I’ll just use CakePHP, which is a Rails clone and one of the best PHP MVC frameworks offered. I know PHP, and I know Rails, so the transition should be smooth. and overall, it has been so far.

The biggest drain on my personal time lately has been my attempt to buy a home. Because I usually write about what I am doing at the moment, I decided I might as well write about my thoughts on buying a home. And because this is my second time through this process in my life, I think I am a little smarter about it now, and maybe I can impart some advice to those who have yet to buy a home.