Off to vacation

Not to disappoint my numerous followers, but I'll be traveling for the next two weeks in South America. So there probably won't be any activity, nor will I be able to return e-mails or respond to comments.

Do stay tuned though.

Neal Ford Keynote - Quite entertaining

Here's a link to an awesome keynote speech delivered by someone who I'm a big fan of, Neal Ford.

Relax! It's hosted on this German site so no I'm not trying to give you spyware. Then again if your browser can infect your computer because of visiting a site you probably deserve it.

I really liked this presentation. A lot of this stuff really hit home with me. The O'REALLYS Accidental Complexity book was terrific. I had to hear the term "NextGen" all year last year. Blowhard Jamboree? Brilliant. It's just great.

I had a stronger than usual dose of the daily wtf at work and this presentation actually prevented me from hitting the bottle immediately at 5pm. Perhaps the serenity it was able to grant me could save some other livers... or marriages.

Everyone should stop occasionally to ask themselves, WWNFD?

What is this blog for?

After many moons of considering it, I done went and set me up a blog. I though about doing something nifty and original, but when it comes to blogging it's really about the content isn't it? Thus the canned blogger site suits my needs well and what an opportunity to rip off some nice design!

In my petty amount of time as a software developer I've managed to expose myself to quite the laundry list of languages, libraries, servers, engines, middlewares, theories, methodologies... It's a laundry list of laundry lists.

So without further ado... This is my blog, Software Maven. Wikipedia defines maven as:

a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. The word maven comes from the Hebrew, via Yiddish, and means one who understands, based on an accumulation of knowledge.

I'm not proclaiming myself as "trusted expert". I don't even trust myself. The accumulation part sure rings true. I love to dive deep into whatever I'm working on and plan to return here to share it with whoever is willing to read.

No guarantees on what the actual content will be. As of now integration testing seems to consume most of my non-project time. Specifically I'm talking GreenPepper and Selenium. But who knows? I may just instead talk about how I slept with JQuery and told Prototype I'm never coming home.

Thanks for coming. Hope to see you again!