It's Been A Long Time...
23 JUN
But I’ve not just been sitting on my arse playing GTA IV, oh no. Well, not all the time anyway. The reason I’ve not posted anything (or been particularly active on the web in general) is that I’ve been damn busy. Most importantly, Catherine kindly gave birth to our first son, Max, back in March which has been quite a change and sapped a lot of my hacking time. I have to say though, despite the horror stories that many veteran parents like to feed you, our experience has only been good. In fact, not good, great. I recommend this reproducing lark.
Secondly, I’ve been hacking away nearly full time on one of my favourite projects to date, Peoples Music Store with LRUG stalwart and renowned anarchist, James ‘Bringing London To Its Very Knees’ Darling which is maturing nicely under private beta as we speak. Peoples Music Store is a great idea from some of the guys behind bleep.com whereby users can construct and customise their very own download store from the music they love then get free music themselves if people buy from their store. It’s a great way to both promote and show off you’re own music taste or in depth genre knowledge and find new music from stores you trust while getting some free digital swag along the way. I’m probably not explaining it well so just drop me a line if you want and invite and the site will explain itself. Public launch is coming in a month or so.
Building Peoples Music Store has been a great learning experience. We run the site on a cloud computing platform and from content ingestion to audio preview delivery to application servers to download packaging and delivery everything has been designed to scale horizontally – and I’m pretty proud of it. Thin, Rack, Sphinx, God, Starling and a whole load more cool open source gear is all running in there. I really need to get to blogging some of what I’ve discovered about working with Rack. It simply is the dog’s bollocks.
So, enough of the excuses. What’s on the horizon?
Speaking and Conferences
I’ve taken some time of speaking and conferencing in general so as to spend lots of time with Catherine and Max but come September I’m restarting the conference trail. Firstly, I’m doing a presentation and a tutorial (with Jarkko Laine) at RailsConf Europe all about JavaScript related Rails stuff and I’m likely to have a slot at @media Ajax as well. Also, I’ll be heading to dConstruct as is the tradition.
Hacking and Open Source Business
Although I’ve not commited to Low Pro or Low Pro JQ for a good while now they are both very much alive. I’ve simply not come across anything that I’ve felt the need to add for a while. If you have any suggestions or patches do let me know. I’ve actually got time to commit them at the moment. Another little project that I’m hoping to get off the ground is called Evil which is going to contain lots of Merb/Rack goodness. The first by-product of which is the merb_openid gem for consuming OpenID in Merb apps (it’s still not quite production ready though so don’t go using it just yet). I’ll let you know what Evil actually does when (or if) I actually get something working.
So, that’s all for now. Just a bit of a status report. I promise I’ll get some useful content written that you actually care about very soon.
11 Comments (Closed)
The open-source stuff went right over my head, but congratulations on the baby! Hopefully catch up with you at dConstruct. :)
Matthew Pennell at 24.06.08 / 08AM
Hey Dan, congrats on the baby!!
I’ve got a suggestion for LowPro (maybe it’s already possible, but I couldn’t find how to do it):
Is there a way to “destroy” Behaviours?
I need to create multiple instances of a Behaviour (“DigitsHandler”) programmatically (new DigitsHandler(el, this);). And then at some point (after an ajax request), I’d need to reinstantiate them all and “destroy” the previous ones (to be sure they are not observing their element anymore).
Is there a proper way of doing that?
thanks! zeno
Zeno at 24.06.08 / 18PM
I just started working on adding OpenID support to the Merb Wiki
Last week I ported the openid-ar store to DataMapper
So now that the datastore is ready, merb_openid looks like it should simplify the rest of the process, so thanks!
meekish at 24.06.08 / 19PM
I’ll be at RailsConf Europe and will be bringing my son, too! I look forward to seeing you again, Dan.
topfunky at 24.06.08 / 21PM
Zeno: No there isn’t at the moment. It’s not something I’ve needed but it could be implemented fairly easily and I can see how it might be useful.
meekish: That’s extemely useful. I’m just gearing up to start writing some stores to go with merb_openid. Would you like to join forces on that? I’ll drop you a mail off line.
topfunky: That’s excellent. Catherine and Max are going to be in Berlin too for a few days before the conf starts. We’ll see you there.
Dan at 24.06.08 / 22PM
Hi Dan, It’s been a while since you posted an article. Congrats on the baby!
Magda at 27.06.08 / 21PM
Congrats on the baby!
There’s actually a thing for lowpro I’ve been wanting to suggest for a while: How about setting up some kind of public repository and/or wiki for behaviors? I’d love to see what other people do with lowpro and, even more, I’d like to see the possibility of getting suggestions for improvements on my own stuff and giving advice myself. Plus maybe add some “Dan Award” for stuff you consider to be great. ;-)
Looking forward to your talk at RailsConf Europe. Cheers. - Clemens
Clemens Kofler at 30.06.08 / 13PM
I agree with Magda suggestion regarding public repository.
sam flowers at 06.07.08 / 01AM
In answer to the public repo for Lowpro behaviours, that’s something I’ve wanted to get going for a little while now, but have never got round to. I’m sure if anyone set one up, it would be used.
For now though, there is the lowpro wiki
James Darling at 03.08.08 / 17PM
Congratulations on your son.
Lohberger at 20.08.08 / 13PM
Congratulations to your little family. From some friends I know that it can be a stressing time but you love this time anyway. Your new project sounds really interesting. So I’m looking forward do know more about it.
Corinna at 26.08.08 / 14PM
About This Article
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