Application Generation - Misc

TIme for a change

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 12:15:00 -0400

Wow - it really has been a while since I've updated this blog. The problem is that I have a bunch of old content here that I don't want to kill, but I also want to pull together application generation and groovy content from two other blogs I have, centralize with a single blog and also create a new site to make it easy to keep up with my tweets, conference presentations and various publications by category. Oh, and of course I'm locked with paying client work. Well, I *will* get this fixed up by the end of March. In the meantime, apologies for the lack of meaningful web presence!

2009 - A Year in Conferences and Publications

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:27:00 -0400

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!

OT: Vote for an animal shelter

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:08:00 -0400

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

Welcome to my new blog

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 12:10:00 -0400

See this entry on my new blog.

Stopping commenting, moving blogs . . .

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 11:24:00 -0400

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.

Balancing Blogging with Working

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 11:24:00 -0400

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.

Random Programming Language News

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 10:50:00 -0400

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.

Reminder: CF Drinks with Joshua Cyr in NYC - Tonight!

Mon, 04 May 2009 15:12:00 -0400

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

JIRA and Confluence for $5 each!

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 11:28:00 -0400

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!

CF Drinks in London?

Sun, 05 Apr 2009 07:00:00 -0400

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!

NFJS Keynote: Career 2.0 - From Grunt to Guru

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:39:00 -0400

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 . . . [More]

The Hipster PDA - A meme that passed me by . . .

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 22:50:00 -0400

I must be the only person who'd never heard of this before. Jared Richardson mentioned it in his keynote tonight at NFJS Boston and I see it was quite the topic of conversation in 2004/5. Clearly I wasn't paying attention . . . Oh well, as Ben Nadel will attest, I've been carrying round one of these since before I even knew it was hip. Last year after a NY ColdFusion group we were having japanese food with that months speaker - Peter Freitag, we started talking about some topic - probably OO or DSLs, and I whipped out my 3x5 notecards and pen (I don't have the clip - call me a minimalist) - I think Ben believes I carry them everywhere just in case I get a chance to sketch out some notes on patterns or code generation!

A Great Time to Hire . . .

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:59:00 -0400

The silver cloud in the current economic downturn is that some amazing developers are going to come onto the market as the companies they work for cut costs. I couldn't believe that Brian Rinaldi got laid off from UM today. Brian is an awesome CF and Flex developer, very well known and regarded in the community. I have heard he has already received a number of emails regarding consulting or employment, but if you're looking for a top developer for a project or to fill a position, this could be a really good time to get some top talent . . .

Stalker-dot-com

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 15:03:00 -0400

I'm pretty much of the perspective that privacy (at least for the digerati) was effectively abolished about five years ago and I'm cool with that. I assume there's nothing I do that won't be published and attributed to me, but while doing a quick Google on a new date (hey, what can I say, I had a computer, a full name and needed an excuse to blow off work for five minutes) I came across a search engine that actually made me a little uncomfortable with the quantity and quality of information provided . . . [More]

An (almost) blogging free flight!

Fri, 19 Dec 2008 16:31:00 -0400

You'll be glad to know that rather than unleashing my usual torrent of blog postings after one of my regular transatlantic flights I spent the time finishing up an article for the next issue of Flex Authority on Test Driven Development using Fluint and cleaning up some code samples I still owed Judith for my Data Mapper article in the last issue of Fusion Authority. Apologies to the people who've been waiting for the sample data mapper code. I've now sent it to Judith and it should be up early next week if not before. It's great to be back in New York, and now that I'm officially an "extraordinary alien" :-) I can actually start to build a more permanent life which will be good. Some changes in my personal situation mean I'll be apartment hunting over the holidays, but I'm looking forwards to getting a place in Manhattan again and 2009 is shaping up to be an excellent year. Happy Holidays!