Life Changes / Website Refresh

Wow. A lot of things have happened in the last six weeks.

First of all, welcome to my new website design, aptly named “Refresh”. I got the design from oswd.org and tweaked it to my needs. Not everything is done yet (esp. Ruby code highlighting), but I’m quite happy with the results. In addition, I’m now running the mental branch of Radiant. I thought about running facets, but it has fallen too far behind mental and I need to finish the API. FYI, the different categories are shown on the homepage through the aggregation extension I finished last week.

In the course of redoing my website, I somehow lost all of my articles and had to re-enter them by copy-paste from Google’s cache. Thanks Google, you saved my butt!

And then there’s the life changes. I decided to leave KCKCC because I was given a nice offer by ThinkPartnership, for whom Ed Hickey, a colleague and fellow Rubyist, works. In the span of the week between when I left KCKCC and started at THK, some personal things came up and I had to turn THK down at the last minute, the morning I was due to start work. I felt bad about the late notice, but luckily there were no hard feelings between us.

So instead, I’m working “full-time” for the stealth Internet startup I’ve been doing part-time since September. So essentially, I’m working from home on that and now available for short-term/small-scope contract projects. I’d especially love to help anyone customize Radiant for their needs.

In the course of all of this, I spent time in San Francisco and was able to meet some really cool people. First, of course, were the CEO of the startup, Gaurav, and his business partner, Tim. I also was lucky enough to attend the East Bay Ruby Meetup and ask questions about scaling of none other than Coda Hale. Then, the next morning, I met André Lewis of GoogleMaps fame. The biggest ego boost I had was that he was interested in my work on Radiant. It’s awesome to be part of such a supportive community.

It’s too late for me to finish it before Tuesday, but I have planned a presentation to our local Ruby Group, titled Customizing RadiantCMS with Extensions. It’s the presentation I had proposed for RailsConf but wasn’t accepted. Speaking of, are you going?