Home Business Answered

Hey folks…no blog updates yet since I’m still busy finishing the new billing feature for UniversityTutor.com. It’s getting pretty crazy…I’ve mostly finished coding up the hand drawn screens that I showed you last week, so I should have a video of them for you soon. They are all ajaxy and look amazing.

I also got approved with a payment processor: www.achdirect.com. This is great news and means I’m getting very close.

Only trouble is that they don’t have a Ruby library (UniversityTutor.com is developed using Ruby on Rails) so I’m having to code this up myself so my site can talk to their payment gateway. I’ll contribute the code to the open source community (as part of the Active Merchant plugin) when it’s done so other people can use it.

Needless to say I am learning about all sorts of programming mumbo jumbo (PCI compliance, SSL encryption, WSDL web services, POST/GET/PUT, etc, etc, etc) and I was reminded that when I hit a tough problem and I’m just not making any progress, here is what I usually do:

• do 30 minutes of either exercise, walking, or mindless television
• eat something

Then come back and things just seem to start working. Try it next time. It really works. After a certain point, pushing yourself further is a downward spiral. But with 30 minutes to reset – clearing the mental calculator if you will – and some sugar your brain will be a high performing machine once again.

Source:How To Solve Tough Problems