Here's a link to my new blog where I've just posted a summary of what I ended up doing with 2009 and some of the things I'm planning for 2010!

Jared (of cf.Objective() fame) mentioned that the animal shelter he got his two dogs from has a chance to win some funding if they get enough votes.

If anyone could vote for them it'd be appreciated . . .

http://www.care2.com/animalsheltercontest/76856?refer=21742.01.1257524353.776606

See this entry on my new blog.

After deleting close to 10,000 spam comments over the last couple of months, I've disabled commenting and am just going to port to wordpress. The site will be appgen.pbell.com and it should be live later today. I'll cross post until the end of the year, I'll keep the old blog running indefinitely for historic content, and I'll add pointers to the new site for anyone who wants to comment on old entries.

I know I could upgrade to the latest version of BlogCFC, but it makes more sense to let wordpress take care of anything and just pay a few dollars for a hosted solution.

Anyone who happened to come by pbell.com over the last few weeks would have seen the dreaded "there are no blog entries that match" message which basically meant I hadn't blogged since August :( I've been pretty busy re-writing lightbase, dealing with my regular clients and handling a really large consulting project.

Usually because I generate most of my code I don't have to work *that* hard to make a good living, but taking on the consulting project has meant I've had to focus almost exclusively on billable work at the expense of blogging. However, I've been working with some great developers and doing some really interesting work on the framework, so I was getting my learning fix just from the work.

I've also been doing a lot of work on tracking my time, using pomodoros both to improve focus and to make it easier to track the profitability of the various projects I work on. However, for a while I was really focused on maximizing the billable hours per week. What I'm now going to try is adding some other non-billable targets such as at least 4-5 pomodoro of blogging a week to make sure I keep a balance with the work. It'll be interesting to see how it works out.

And in random programming language news:

Ruby has a BigDecimal error which could lead to DoS attacks. Time to hack - err I mean upgrade - all of your Rails sites.

PHP has finally broken down and added a Goto statement as of 5.3. I double checked and the commit date wasn't April 1st, so now I really have a reason to start using PHP for my web apps. I wasn't really impressed with the inconsistent syntax and so-so object implementation, but now they have "goto", they will rule the web world.

It appears that at JavaOne, despite early reports of a takeover by Scala, a Groovy book made it onto the top ten list of books sold.

Just a reminder - all details here. See you tonight!

Hey, just wanted to share this. If you work in a team of up to five people, until the 24th, you can get a copy of JIRA and/or a copy of Confluence for $5 each. It's the enterprise version, you need to run it in stand alone mode, but overall seems like an excellent deal for anyone working on a small team.

Doesn't hurt that the proceeds go to charity.

Sure I know it's a shameless ploy to get us all hooked into using JIRA, but it's a really good bug tracker, and if you only have five people on a given project, to me it's a no brainer. check it out!

I'm in London to present at the BCS SPA conference this week and was wondering if anyone might like to grab a quick drink on Wednesday of this week (April 8th) somewhere in central London? I believe Nik is going to be seeing what he can organize, but if there's anyone who might be interested, just comment below and as soon as we've sorted out a time and a place I'll comment on this thread with the details.

Looking forwards to seeing anyone who can make it!

I really wasn't sure what I'd get out of Jared Richardson's keynote on "Career 2.0". I've been running my own businesses for close to twenty years, so I don't find most "career" talks that relevant. In fact, Jareds presentation was one of the clearest, funniest and best structured presentations I've ever seen on building a reputation as a programmer . . .

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