Ever since I took residence in Casa del Cinco (yes, it is also number ‘5′ on the street) it has been a “no mans land” that is fought over constantly by the cats in the neighborhood. This battle manifests itself as curly little piles of crap on the lawn. I always thought cats only did their biz in the garden - turns out that the rule is a little more general. They do their biz where the results can be hidden - ie. long grass does the trick.

One of the little lies I tell myself is that that my one and only ‘neurosis’ is the fact that I am never settled until the lawn is mowed. This is a lie because it’s a Neurosis, not a ‘neurosis’ and it’s not the only one (the same things goes for getting my hair cut - but that’s a story for another day). As the weather has been atrocious the lawns have haven’t been mown for a while. The weekend has delivered two days of dry weather and so I was able to get out there with gusto. The cats had beaten me to it and so it was a regular old cat-scat-fest.

There is something very galling about having to deal with some one else’s cat’s crap. While The Missus won’t be pleased with this - I hope Pi grows up to big and mean like Mandu so at least I will only have to deal my own cat’s deposits.

The building that housed my first ‘lab‘ has been bowled - to make way for a hotel.

IMG_0158.JPG
Originally uploaded by flash5.

It was the home of my skateboard and early e-ink projects

http://twitter.com/davetenhave

Finally got to dog food my own product

…and I learned some stuff.

Well, after a bit of a struggle (damn them and their “secure by default” policies) I have been able to spin up an Amazon EC2 instance. So now I have essentially limitless computing priced by the hour … REALLY powerful! This means I can now foot it, software wise, on a global scale - from my office, muuuuuuuuuuuuuhaha! But seriously - Kiwi companies, pay attention! Global computing infrastructure for dollars …

I am using the very slick Right Scale tool. The guys there have done a great job in wrapping up the Amazon services in a very neat package. Nice work!

At Ponoko we’re eating up milestones and to keep up this rate I’m looking for someone to take charge of the development side of the company. I’m looking for a CTO or Senior Dev person.

The app is built on a RoR/MySQL/Linux stack. So I need someone with experience in that environment. I will also pay attention to really experienced (8+ years) web developers who are willing to come up to speed on the platform (e.g. LAMP developers) or developers who have a lot of experience with dynamic languages (Pythonistas feel free to apply). Bonus points are given to developers with a design or art bent. Special attention will also be paid to developers who have worked in a design led software development environment.

I’m not looking for a contractor. I want someone to join our team, buy into our dream and be involved in something quite special. You will be a person who has successfully shipped, who will be able to bring a bag of processes and who we can build a team around.

If you want an idea of my history and working with me please check out my LinkedIn profile.

Send your CV to david@ponoko.com

After about 2 years I have the final products:

Originally uploaded by flash5.

I’m after premisses for my new project. It doesn’t have to be terribly flash or corporate. I need to be able provide a comfortable daily working environment for 3 to 5 warm bodies. It needs to be in central Wellington (Te Aro, City, Mt Vic, Newtown, Thorndon, Kelburn at a push). It also needs to be cheap :-).

Happy to share with the right company.

If you know of a place drop me a line.

… that HOLY CRAP! adrenaline rush I get when the size of the workload finally sinks in. It’s a project cycle I’m used to… it was pretty much my MO at Provoke. Sanguine dithering followed by an almost neurotic focus. It washes over me like stepping into a cold shower.

I noticed it because I haven’t felt it in seven months. It pops back like any other skill that I have neglected for a period - like one of those friendships you have where you can be apart for years and yet still ask intimate questions over a chance coffee.

I have spent the last two weeks implementing an app in Ruby on Rails. I have to say that I am very seriously impressed.

I don’t particularly miss writing stored procs and I sure don’t miss having to write data-layer code. I like the relative simplicity of the stack and I love the general consistency of just about every thing (though a couple of Ruby issues tripped me up early on). Partial templates are super powerful, especially once you throw AJAX into the mix. I have all the tools I’m used to such as breakpoints etc and I am yet to reach an “aw crap! can’t do that!” moment.

The single most impressive thing has been how productive I have been… kinda to the point of leaving me a little more slack jawed than usual. The single biggest brake on my progress is finding out HOW to do stuff. The core documentation is very good, but I have found that I rapidly got into stuff that wasn’t as clearly documented which, when combined with my lack of knowledge with the language, made me feel a little like the way I feel on the dance floor - two left feet and got no rhythm. A typical day is hours of research and minutes of coding. But that’ll teach me to tackle a whole new platform and a whole new language.

Syntactically, Ruby is a pretty language with some great features for dealing with collections and specifying ranges. I don’t miss my curly braces and semicolons at all.

The experience to date has provided a lot food for thought about executing business ideas and the cult of complexity… But over all it has left me very excited about software again.