O'Reilly ONLamp just accepted my proposal to write an article about WASP!

I released WASP version 1.0RC1 today.

Ever since I put up the new website and linked it from freshmeat, it's been averaging more than 2,000 hits per day.(!)

2 People (other than me) have linked it from del.icio.us, which is cool because that means they think it's worth looking at. There are also a few people that have subscribed to my news announcements.

This thing could take off.

Once I get 1.0 properly released and have complete documentation (including a nifty "how to make a blog using WASP in less than 30 minutes") up, I'm going to submit it as a slashdot article and hopefully it'll get some real press.

:: geeking out ::

This is really a great article:
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

In short:

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price." And Chaucer complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne."

Good advice. There aren't shortcuts, you just have to buckle down and do it.