Valentine's day hacking

Valentine's Day Hacking
by Terriko.

I'm in a long distance relationship, which means if we want to do something together for valentine's day, we either have to spend money on plane tickets or we have to get a little creative. Last year was plane tickets, but this year we went with creative.

We decided that it'd be fun to do a little hack project together, and chose one we'd discussed with friends previously so we wouldn't spend the entire evening arguing out architecture. We decided that Ruby was clearly the most valentine's day-like language (although perl could have worked, Ruby is clearly the romantic winner due to the colour) and we wanted an excuse to learn it anyhow, so that worked out.

The Internet helped a lot: as you can see in the screenshot, google docs works not only for prototyping db tables but also for cheesy flirtation. The VPN let me work comfortably on his local machines. Skype let us talk and see each other. IM let us send commands and code snippets and links to each other.

It's not a romantic dinner date, but I'm sure working on a project together is more relationship-building anyhow. The project isn't done, so I forsee more together time in the future: way better than a one night date night. Take that, women's mags! Go geeky romance. ;)