On March 15th, I’ll be speaking at Refresh Events at The Drake Hotel in Toronto to discuss the benefits of Grails.
Here is the talk outline:
Programming Java applications is often viewed as less than pleasurable. This perception is exacerbated when enterprise Java frameworks are stacked up next to all the wonderful new web frameworks and methodologies available to developers today. Grails, a Java-based, agile web development MVC framework, may change all that.
In this talk, learn from a one-time skeptic how your team can use Grails to speed up project delivery, streamline maintenance and support, increase functionality and performance, allowing you to spend more time focused on business objectives in your next web project.
If this sounds like something that might interest you, register here!
Today is a very special day for me. It marks the end of a very significant period of my life. At the tender age of 16, I started working as a contract web developer, a career, which has now supported me for nearly 12 years.
There have been good times and bad, and many, many lessons learned. Ultimately, I’m proud of the path I took. Through pure stubbornness, I managed to bypass post-secondary education, by working my ass off to learn what I needed to know to get the job done (often after I had already sold it). In many ways, I attribute my success in this business to this fly or fall approach because it kept me on my toes, always learning, always hungry to improve my skills, and always ready to take on new challenges.
Looking back, I know that I went about things the hard way. A wiser, less obstinate person would have gone about things differently, but then I wouldn’t be the person I am today.
For the last year and a half, I have been working with The Blog Studio. My time with them has been very important to me for a lot of reasons. It freed me of my solitary home office, and got me out into the world, working face-to-face with people again. The life of a freelancer, especially in this industry, can be a hermetic one, and working with Peter, Lucia and Mike was a very welcome and necessary change.
Next week, I start a new era of my life as I leave the world of contract work and venture down a new, exciting path. A remarkable opportunity landed on my lap a couple weeks ago, and enticed me to make some life altering decisions.
On Monday, I will be starting work, as an employee (for the first time since directing cars in the parking lot at the Stratford Festival as an early teen), with Toronto-based Architech. Architech builds kick ass software. They are a team of people who are extremely passionate about building amazing applications for business and I could never make the jump into a full-time position like this without sharing core beliefs and passions like I do with Architech. I’m confident we will have a bright future together.
Needless to say, I’m extremely excited, and can’t wait to see where this new direction takes me.
Rather than using one of the pre-existing authentication libraries in kitolab, which I find bloated and generally so-so, I’ve decided to write my own. I’ve also decided to share the core of the library for all to use. It’s intentially minimalist, and provides only the bare essentials so you can use it as a starting point to build out our application specific user library needs.
To download and get more information, check out the user library project page.
Just a quick note, if you’re interested in being notified when kitolab launches, or wish to participate in the closed beta test, please go to www.kitolab.com and sign up. You can also follow @kitolab on Twitter of course.
After weeks of brainstorming, domain searching, forceful premature balding and sleepless nights, I’ve finally decided on a name for my upcoming project management app.
What’s in a name?
For the longest time I was intensely frustrated that I couldn’t find available domain names in the project management realm. Before long I found that I was starting to settle for names that didn’t really mean anything, and were hardly memorable.
Then I started to take a more systematic approach to finding a name. Aside from all the standard naming criteria, I decided that I wanted the name to represent:
- More than just tasks. What I’m building is not a to-do list manager, it’s a much more intelligent project management assistant (a lab partner, if you will).
- More science than art. Typically, project management is a lot of guess work. I aim to replace much of that guess work with tangible, data-supported analysis.
- Simplicity & fun. Ok, it’s not likely that managing projects will ever be “fun”, but if it’s not “painful”, that’s a start.
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