Dread Pirate PJ's House of Hacks and Tricks » web.technologies

Another article fresh out of the oven

dreadpiratepj — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 05:32:27 +0000

I just got word from my editor at Developer.com that my latest article was published yesterday.

The article is called “Writing Facebook Applications with Java EE” and you can find it here.

The amount of information out there on writing Facebook apps with Java is scarce, and what is out there for Java Facebook applications, is often incomplete. I hope the article helps Java Facebook developers start on the right foot.

It was interesting returning to work with Java, even if only for the few weekends during which I wrote this article. I hadn’t developed in Java at all in almost two years. I was surprised I hadn’t forgotten any important details.

I have another article for Amazon Web Services submitted and in the editing pipeline. It should be coming out in the next few weeks

Much Railing Lately

dreadpiratepj — Tue, 15 May 2007 05:17:03 +0000

I’ve been at my new job only four weeks, and my first project is nearly finished. My task these past four weeks has been the re-implementation of the company’s website in Rails. I was to do this from scratch, while keeping the site’s design and existing link structure. Among my requirements is adding support for multiple languages, as the company wants to show it knows how to make websites for a diverse, multi-ethnic audience. Another requirement was, that I was to do this re-implementation by myself. The company only has one other experienced Rails developer, and he is busy doing maintenance work on older non-Rails projects for company customers.

It’s been a pleasure working on this project, and I am very pleased in the progress I’ve made in such a short time. I look forward to going live in another two to three weeks, once the site has been through QA and any changes required.

—

This coming Wednesday, May 16, I am off to RailsConf 2007, in the lovely city of Portland, Oregon. Portland is great, I have been there twice and I’ve had a great time each trip. I look forward to the visit very much.

Two of my coworkers from the Williams F1 project, Kyle Drake and Nick Wright, are going to be attending RailsConf as well. It’s gonna be great to meet them face-to-face. Daniel Browning, one of my fellow coworkers at my new job, lives just north of Portland. My college buddy Ken Williams lives in the Portland area too. I plan to meet with them at some time during this, my third visit to Portland.

There are so many sessions I want to attend at RailsConf. But interestingly enough, I feel I won’t get any value out of the tutorial sessions, so I didn’t sign up for any of them. That means I’m out of the tutorial-attending n00b league, yeah! We’ll see whether I can hang on to that thought in the other, more advanced sessions.

A few of the sessions sound downright dull. I guess some of the n00bs will find them interesting, since they’re looking for ‘insight’ and whatnot. Whatever.

What am I looking for from RailsConf? I’m looking for some nitty-gritty I can sink my teeth into, some new tech I can experiment with and learn more from. I’m looking forward to have my brain blown by something cool but complicated that I can learn over the next few months. I want to learn about some new-to-me techniques and plugins or gems that I can master and take my Ruby and Rails to a higher level.

I also look forward to meeting some people face to face. Tim Bray is going to be delivering the keynote on Saturday morning. If you’ve been reading my blog for the last year, you already know what I think of him: he’s the d00d!

The JRuby guys will be presenting one session, and I think their work is of importance for the growth of Rails outside the leading edge. I think JRuby will be the thing to help Rails cross the chasm and be adopted by mainstream.

At OSCON 2005, DHH signed my Agile Web Development With Rails 1st Edition, so I will try to get Robert Martin, Dave Thomas, and Andy Hunt to sign some of my other books that they wrote.

Anyway, I’ll talk to you all later!

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Bringin’ in da dough, baby!

dreadpiratepj — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 06:55:10 +0000

Last Wednesday, I sent emails and résumés for various job posts, and by that afternoon, I started getting nibbles. It was weird! Whereas I barely got any attention for over a dozen job applications I sent out between September and early February, I suddenly had five companies interested in me in a matter of hours! Maybe companies were waiting for post-holiday economy reports to start hiring? I wonder.

So to cut to the chase, I got a great hourly-pay remote development gig working on a Ruby on Rails project, on a really cool sounding website, for a very-high-profile vehicle racing company in the UK. It’s right down Ken’s alley, but if I’m not mistaken, this sport usually has a definitely more European racing audience. I think American racing fans like Ken, might resent these are not American cars, and just don’t watch. LOL

I cannot disclose any more information because of client confidentiality, but I think I may already have said too much. :-p

I’ll post a link here when the site goes up, at any rate. Only then can we drop all this silly NDA crap. It’s a bummer, because I can’t discuss application architecture specifics that would be of interest to my readers.

But fret not. There’s no rule about my discussing the project’s architecture in general. I just can’t say right out what architecture I’m dealing with on this gig.

I’ll be writing more about Rails in the weeks ahead, but just cuz I write about it, don’t mean it’s got a thing to do with work, you hear? :: rolls eyes ::

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