A return

I have returned to the world of blogging. Whether or not this is a good thing remains to be seen. Granted, my first crack at the activity was more of a way to avoid massive numbers of emails  as I cycled across Canada with my then fiancé. Inspired by both Steve Yegge and Jeff Atwood, I think I'll give this whole on-line writing thing another shot. Recently they have both publicly stated, or more accurately reiterated, that having an on-line persona is probably fairly important if you think that someone might google you at some point...

Regardless, in the spirit of these things, an introduction.

I currently live in Ottawa, Ontario with my wife and two budgies. I am what I consider to be a professional software developer. I have been working with Java on and off since 1998 and that is currently my most comfortable language. That said, I am currently enjoying Ruby quite a bit. I use PHP for general scripting needs. I have also written a couple of not totally trivial applications in C++, though that was a while back now, and at least recognize Lisp. In previous years I have also tinkered with 3D engines and OpenGL programming.

Recently I have worked (re-) writing an on-line store framework for a printing company using a Java/JSP based approach. I more or less headed the re-write effort and over the course of a couple of years had replaced the entire code base while shrinking it from 140k lines of code down to about 70k. There will be blog posts on the awesomeness of that project in the future. Following there, I became the lead developer and co-founder of a short lived start-up. It didn't make it (officially as of late last week, but in hindsight, I should have known a couple of weeks before that), but mostly due to the mistakes of the founders more than anything else. Next time, I will more closely heed Paul Graham.The software was written in Java and used the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) extensively. Enough so that I can feel that I can comment fairly intelligently on the pros and cons of that framework. I intend on releasing the application with an open source license eventually, but when exactly the right time for that is currently debatable.

That about covers the 'code' portion.  I also like to ride bicycles. Mostly this is for fitness purposes, but I also dabble in racing. Dabble is a key word as I am terrible (== slow) at it. Right now I am about halfway through the cyclocross season here in Ottawa. The local Ottawa Bicycle Club puts on a most awesome series, you can find me at the bottom of the various R2 results at www.cyclocross.org.

That about sums it up, I'm aiming for something twice per week or so, that should be one cycling and one code relating post. We shall see.