Introduction

Welcome to my blog.  I'm just an old guy that is trying to learn new tricks every day.  Well, I'm an old guy in the sense that my daughter came up to me one day and asked if I had used quills to write with when I was in school.  Though I did use a quill in art class it wasn't because that is all we had - it was just to illustrate how the tool worked.

There is a saying along the lines of "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."  I don't really believe this and I thought I'd twist the words a bit and use it as a catchy domain name, thus - OldGuyNewTrick.com (alternative site: ognt.io)

I don't consider myself old as a mid-forties guy, but for keeping with the fun, I'll play the role of an old guy and the context of a 'trick' is me learning how to code in Ruby and Rails.  Well actually web development in general, but the focus is on Ruby and Rails.

I will leverage this blog to document my journey and share my experiences.  Years ago I had toyed with blogs and tools like WordPress.  I really hadn't given any thought to starting a new blog until I heard several well known people in the Ruby community, for example Ben Orenstein, suggest that if one is a programmer, they should have a blog.

Will anyone ever read this?  Why have a blog?  At first I disagreed with them and wasn't going to do it.  But it was like the universe was talking to me.  The topic of having a blog kept coming up in conversations, podcasts, and screencasts.  And I had a thought - even if no one reads this but me, it will still be useful.  By writing down my experiences I will have a good reference to look back on.  I may figure out a solution to a problem this week, and have a similar one a year from now.  But being an old guy, I may not remember, so I can refer back to this blog.

I am not well known in the programming community, but I plan on making a dent in the community.  On twitter and github I go by hogihung.  I wouldn't get all giddy and jump over to GitHub to see what I've done - you'll be disappointed.  Remeber, I'm new at this.  All I have is learning demos up there at the moment.  

Ho Gi Hung is my Chinese name and I tend to use it as my internet persona.  My given name is John F. Hogarty, glad to meet you.

One last item to note - this blog is created using Octopress and hosted on GitHub.  I'm still learning how all this works, so please bear with me as I work out the kinks.  :)

This blog was converted from Octopress on GitHub to my home grown Ruby on Rails solution (FlexBlogr), hosted on m Virtual Private Server (VPS) at Digital Ocean.

Learn Something New Everyday

Last Edited by: John on November 11, 2015