What I’ve been up to

About once per year I realize that I’ve neglected my blog and decide that it’s time to change that. I’m going to try to blog at least once per week, starting with this recap of what I’ve been up to since my last post.

My last few posts were about WordPress, as I was coming off major XML-RPC contributions to the 3.4 release. I was able to contribute new user management capabilities to XML-RPC for 3.5, but wasn’t able to stay involved for the full cycle.

That’s because in September I moved to Seattle. I’m living in a great apartment in the First Hill neighborhood, which is easy walking distance to both downtown and Capitol Hill, and has easy access to the highways to get to my new job on the eastside of Lake Washington in Bellevue.

At the end of September I rejoined the Microsoft Dynamics CRM team as a full-time developer. I had interned with them several times, and was excited to see familiar faces and work on a great product.

While I can’t talk too much about what we’re working on, I do intend to share some general lessons-learned on this blog. I’ve been leading performance efforts for a complex HTML5 business application, which has been a fun challenge.

As most people who’ve worked with me can attest, I’m very passionate about performance, and have spent years honing my backend server optimization skills; now I’ve been working almost exclusively on front-end browser performance for seven months and have many tips and tricks to share.

I’ve also kept busy with several side projects. Rob and I finally released NUIBreak, which uses Kinect for Windows to remind office workers to take regular breaks and stretch.

We also built and released several updates for a C#/XAML WinRT app called VideoSnacker. I’ll likely write about this process, as we ran into many gotchas, certification challenges, and YouTube API issues.

There are some other projects which are still pending and I can’t talk about yet. Hopefully I’ll have more on that front later in the year.

Next week I’ll be giving a talk at a Unit & Behavioral testing hackday in Portland. The following weekend I’ll be mentoring CodeWithMe Portland, teaching journalists the basics of web development.

More posts to come soon!

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