I’ve been thinking a lot about writing a chess book lately. The idea has been floating around in my head, and I couldn’t really figure out what the theme was or how to describe it, but essentially it would be an expansion on the 84-page monograph I wrote this summer for the Rockhurst chess camp, artfully titled What a beginner needs to know to become a strong competitive chess player who enjoys the game, knows how to develop and improve, and has the foundational understanding required to be successful, a.k.a. ‘Andrew Latham’s chess lesson plan’.

Earlier this week, when I was working on my USCF-Stats project, I had something I wanted to do that I didn't know how to do. I wanted to dynamically change a Ruby variable and update my page based on its new contents.

I didn't think this would be hard to do, but it ended up taking quite a while. Ajax in Rails has undergone some changes in recent version, so a lot of the articles online were out of date.

To prepare for the re-design, I read "Design for Hackers", "Don't Make Me Think", the UX myths website, and some blog posts and answers on Quora and StackExchange about web design and UI/UX.

Before doing anything new, I first asked my friend Amelia to take a look at my old website and tell me what she thought was wrong with it.