David Keener has been invited by Code Sherpas to create a course for their “Skillset In a Day” educational program. The Skillset in a Day series consists of one-day courses that delve deeply into a single technical subject. They are designed to give technical professionals a jump-start in the target subject in a minimum amount of time.
Radical Career Success Online
On July 1, 2009, Chad Fowler and Andy Lester had an excellent webcast, sponsored by O’Reilly, called “Radical Career Success in a Down Economy.” The recording of that webcast is now available online, as well as my blog entry discussing the talk.
RubyNation 2009 Survey Results
Survey results from the RubyNation 2009 survey have been trickling in, and we’re very pleased with the results. This was only the second year that we’ve run the conference, and we’ve sold out both years. Even better, 2009 had 15% more attendees than 2008, so we were able to occupy a larger venue. Anyway, 66.8% of respondents rated RubyNation Very Good or Excellent compared to similar conferences. Counting in those who considered the conference Average for its type, 91.8% of respondents considered RubyNation to be Average or better for this type of technical conference.
All Articles Now Online Again
All KeenerTech.com articles are now online again. Some of the older articles, from 2006 and early 2007, required extra work to get them moved into the new content management system. So, now you know how Dave Keener spent a good part of his July 4th holiday weekend.
Missing Content Online Soon
There are still a few issues being worked out since the launch of the new KeenerTech.com on Sunday, June 21. The largest is that some of the oldest articles on the site, including a couple of Dave’s most popular articles, are not online yet. That will be fixed by the end of this upcoming weekend. Those articles actually pre-date any use of a content management system for the site and are thus in HTML form. They’ll be online as soon as they can be entered into the site’s CMS and be suitably edited and verified.
Charles Calvert Talk in Tysons Corner
Charles Calvert will be talking at the next meeting of the Independent Computer Consultants Association in Tysons Corner. His topic will be “Becoming an Independent Consultant.” The meeting is at the Olive Garden. Networking begins at 6:30 PM, dinner at 7:00 and the talk will start around 8:00. The cost is $30 for non-members ($35 at the door), but this cost also includes the dinner and non-alcoholic beverages.
Subversion Branching and Merging
This blog entry by Ned Batchelder is basically the best article I’ve seen on branching and merging using Subversion.
Note: (2018/01/13) Er, it’s a good article. But I’ve since moved on to git, a technology that makes branching and merging much, much easier. Friends don’t let friends do Subversion anymore.
Next NOVARUG Meeting Should Be Good
Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas, two prominent Ruby-ists, will be speaking at the next NovaRUG meeting on April 15, 2009. Talks start at 7:00 PM; networking begins at 6:30. It may be crowded, so register in advance. The meeting will be held at FGM headquarters; see the NovaRUG web site for details on the location and how to register.
Hosting with WebFaction
Based on recommendations from several of my fellow web professionals, including Naveen Vemula and Allan Bunch, I’ve chosen WebFaction.com for my Rails web hosting needs. I have 4 web sites that will be moved to Rails over the next few months, including KeenerTech.com.
Recent Partial Web Site Outage
My apologies to everyone for the recent problems with the web site. My hosting company, AccuWebHosting.com, made a sweeping security policy change on the Windows host where my site resides which broke major portions of my web site. Basically, they broke the site’s capability to show the full text of articles and also broke most of the administrative features of the site … right before I went on vacation to Scotland for 10 days. Needless to say, I exchanged some progressively more aggressive emails with them until the problem was resolved today.