September 2007, a life update September 5th

Tap tap, is this thing on?

Looking at the fact that the most recent article on this site was written on May 9 was making me sad for a long time, yet I always found plenty of excuses to not produce new content. (All of them being moot, of course.)

So here I am, finally convincing myself that letting this site die out totally would be bad in way too many ways. I haven’t yet formally decided in which direction content will be flowing, so I’ll try to give a simple update of recent happenings.

The book

The major project that kept me busy during the second half of last year was of course finishing up my beginner’s book about developing Rails applications for SitePoint. Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications has been selling for roughly 6 months now and I’m eagerly awaiting the first sales figures.

Due to the fact that we were pushing the book out right after the release of Rails 1.2 it might’ve been a bumpy ride for some readers at some point since several major things changed in the Rails world after the book went to print. Because of that, the book ended up with a fairly big chunk of errata. Still, it was the right decision to focus on Rails 1.2 at that point and the errata has hopefully been comprehensive enough to assist readers when they got stuck. I also monitor the SitePoint forums closely and jump in to assist whenever necessary.

Additionally, one particular chapter in the book, although still applicable, got outdated quickly and will soon enough be replaced with new content that is going up on SitePoint.com as an article real soon now.

Gwen turns 2

On July 30th, my daughter Gwendolyn turned 2 having her first “real” birthday party with friends and such. It was an exhausting endeavor for both her and us :) But still, a lot of fun!

In general, Gwen’s been awesome. Although she’s only two, she’s talking about as much as I am, probably more. So much talking, so many words coming out of her baby brain. She’s also learning the alphabet using her new VTech learning laptop.

Oh, and no, as Kottke put it, this site won’t turn “into some kind of daddyblog” either.

RSpec

After having happily spent a long time in the test/spec camp when it comes to Behavior Driven Development for my Rails projects, I’ve recently started to adopt RSpec for my current and future projects. Its tight integration and the solidness coming with recent releases (past the 1.0 milestone, I guess) really made it a joy to work with.

Currently being in an unreleased and still-ironing-out-the-bugs state, the next release of RSpec will also come with rbehave merged into it, so it’s also possible to setup user stories to replace Rails’ own integration tests. Pat Maddox has a beautiful write-up on this very topic.

The lead developers of RSpec are also giving a talk titled A Half-day of Behavior-driven Development on Rails at the upcoming RailsConf Europe.

Visited by JDD

As for even more recent happenings, my friend and photographic mentor James Duncan Davidson visited me as part of his trip to Europe this month. Besides the usual “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” geekery we’ve obviously been out and about to shoot a few frames of several places in and around Wiesbaden, Germany.

Although the weather was far from striking (cloudy skies, frequent yet light rain showers), a couple pictures actually turned out pretty decently. You can find Duncan’s photoset here on Flickr, mine is right next to it. Duncan also blogged about this part of his trip.

RailsConf

Speaking of Duncan, he’s also hopped to Europe to shoot RailsConf Europe taking place in Berlin, Germany this year from September 17-19 featuring a boatload of interesting talks and sessions. While yours truly will not be presenting anything, I’m attending the conference and will be in Berlin starting September 16. Shoot me a message if you’re in town as well.

And by the way of Rails conferences, I’ve also attended Rails Konferenz in Frankfurt, Germany last June. My set of pictures shooting the conference can be found on Flickr, as usual. The conference itself was a little lacking, for my taste, probably due to the fact that RailsConf Europe is coming up now and people had been opting to rather go there instead of the Frankfurt one. Still, it’s a worthy effort that Thomas Baustert and friends should keep on pursuing.

Photography

As you might’ve guessed from the entries of my tumblelog and the references in this article, photography has taken up quite a seat in my life. I have yet to find my favorite shooting environment (although I’m pretty much certain that I don’t want to pursue a career as a beauty and fashion photographer) so I’m experimenting with all sorts of different shooting situations from available light to using strobes, from landscapes to studio work, from conference shooting to casual street shooting.

The workflow tool of choice as of March of 2007 has been Adobe Lightroom (previously I was hooked up to Apple Aperture until it showed that Lightroom’s workflow was so much faster dealing with huge RAW images of my Canon full-frame body).

Lightroom has really been a pleasure to work with. If you need a primer of what it can do for you, Michael Reichmann’s and Jeff Schewe’s Lightroom Video Tutorial sold through Luminous Landscape is probably the best resource for this. Additionally, the O’Reilly blog Inside Adobe Lightroom has daily tips, tricks and workflow help for working with the program. Duncan even published two of my Lightroom tips recently.

I’ve setup a placeholder site at photo.graphi.st for what may or may not become a future business.

OmniFocus

Self-organizing by using methodologies such as Getting Things Done and Inbox Zero have long been part of my life. What I haven’t found thus far was the perfect tool for the job. I’ve pondered baking my own, but haven’t gone down that path for various reasons, the most important being.. the lack of time.

Right now my private and professional life is spread over several tools, including but not limited to the trio infernale from 37signals (Highrise, Basecamp, Backpack), my IMAP mailboxes, and, as of recently, the still-not-quite-beta OmniFocus from the OmniGroup.

OmniFocus still has some way to go before being able to take over the center spot of my self-organization. But let’s be fair, they haven’t left the alpha stage. Yet still, they’ve accomplished quite something with regards to the workflow OmniFocus encourages. My major roadblock right now is the fact that it’s a desktop app. My tasks have always been with me in some form, yet with OmniFocus and even using tools like FolderShare (ignoring the fact that they’ve been acquired by Microsoft and been dormant for quite some time now) means I’ll have to remember to close the application on all of my machines when leaving the house or office or it’ll complain about “already being open”.

Maybe there’s a blog post or two to come out of this. I don’t yet know. I’ll try hard to adopt. And adapt.

Music I’m listening to

Closing off this way too lengthy post, here are some of the albums that I’ve recently added to my playlist.