My white paper on decision support systems agility is coming along. I am also reading 4 books at the same time - 1) Agile Development With Rails 2) The World Is Flat 3) Blink 4) Agile Software Development With Scrum. I've been thinking of a content site to serve as a few purposes, 1) Get my wife involved in the world of dentistry again 2) Get my wife involved in the world of web development 3) Build up a working test bed for my ideas on decision support systems agility 4) Get my wife to help me prepare for my nephew who I want to take on as my apprentice shortly after he completes his first year of college.
About 6 years back, a group of classmates of mine got together for a project management project to build a small dental office application that recorded patient information and examination history. After seeing how easy it is to build things in Ruby, I am inspired to treat this as my next project. There is a whole yahoo group community of my wife's old classmates that might benefit from such a application placed on the web as long as it didn't lock up their data. I'm going to propose to my wife that I teach her Ruby/HTML/MySQL enough to build this application with me and get her friends who have practices still using paper records or basic spreadsheets to use it. The feedback loop from them would be a key component to demonstrating and developing my theories on DSS agility. It also makes for a great, quirky, non-mainstream story. The benefit with doing the open source coding for small Filipino based neighborhood dental offices is that there are not as many restrictions, rules, and regulations about data over there that would impede progress as long as precautions were taken to handle the data with care.
Anyway, I still have to finish the Ruby book and get the rust out of my programming skills again. I'll ask Melissa to focus on presentation aspects because she has a good eye for that and it's hard to teach an old dog like me new tricks.
For now, I focus on getting my Lock And Key Id project running smoothly and forward again.
