Have you ever read a book where there's an empty page between chapters? You finish the chapter, turn the next page, and nothing's there. Quickly, you turn to the next page to make sure your book didn't ship with a page that went unprinted. It didn't, but it does give you that brief moment of pause.
I just turned to a blank page. I know there's a new chapter getting ready to start, but I'm going to take a moment to savor the green field that is that blank page. This week is my last Ning.
I've spent a lot of time and done a lot of soul searching, and just felt that it isn't the correct place for me right now. The team at Ning is truly amazing. I've never worked on a team with as much depth as the one they've assembled. Everyone there is a rock star. That said, I need something different.
I don't know what's next... yet. There's lots of great ideas out there and I have a few personal projects I want to spend some time on:
- PHPT is is dire need of finishing and documenting. It runs, but doesn't handle everything in php-src which is it's true test.
- I want to spend a bit of time with YABT. I've got some ideas I want to try out and see if they work.
- I've been "learning" Cocoa and Objective C for something like 5 months now, I want to get actually get proficient in it as there's a few apps that no one else has done yet that I'm going to write.
- I'm getting the itch to write more. That means more blogging and I have a few ideas swirling about for books. I said I'd never spend another summer writing, but I might just if one of these ideas gets some traction.
- And as they say... and so much more.
Sounds like tons to do. Of course, I can't spend all of my time working on my pet projects, unless I find a benefactor/patron (and if you fit that description and are looking for someone to sponsor, please do email me), so if you're looking for a senior level PHP dev and have an interesting concept, drop me a line or leave a comment.
Almost. I do have more time this week than I did the previous week, and even more than the week before that, and so on. The last time I was out at HQ someone who had just found out that I was writing a book asked how in the world I had the time to do it. What, with starting a new job at a start-up and all. Quite honestly, I don't know how I managed. The last few months have been little more than a blur.
Here's a few highlights. As you know, America elected its first black President. Hooray! I didn't vote for him. That's a whole other, guilt-ridden post that will come out at some point.
Around the same time I finished up my book. This past Tuesday I got the final draft after the layout guys had got it ready for publication. According to the schedule I have, the printers should be setting it up as we speak.
Working with everyone at Pragmatic Bookshelf has been an unbelievable honor and an amazing learning experience. I thought I knew a fair amount about writing. Working with professionals showed me exactly how much I didn't know. Good thing I draw my monthly paycheck from another line of work.
This last week Meg and I put in an offer on a new house right off of downtown Lawrence and had it accepted. There's a great story revolving around the offer process that, again, is a post unto itself. We're set to close the first part of December assuming everything continues along smoothly.
It's a great, nearly 100-year-old house two blocks from the heart of Lawrence. Stoked doesn't begin to describe how excited we both are, but there's some miscellaneous to take care of. Speaking of which, if you know of anyone in Lawrence who would love a killer deal on a townhouse through July of '09, let me know.
On the code front, I've got back to coding for fun. With the book and talks and everything that's been happening for the last few months I had almost forgot how much of a joy it is to sit down and hack on code just for the joy of creating something.
One of my co-workers, Brian McCallister, created a mailing list for Yet Another Bug Tracker, or yabt. The last time I was in Cali we were talking about how we both wanted a simple bug tracker that stored everything in the repository. Whenever you've got your code, you've got your tickets too.
Both of us have been kicking around the idea for years, he finally did something about it a few weeks ago and I've been playing with some code this week. I posted what I anticipate the initial CLI looking like. If you're interested in participating, join up and share your thoughts.
Other than that, not much is happening around here. I've got some much needed vacation time schedule for after Thanksgiving, just in time to get ready to move! :-)
