RubyJax
As my wife mentioned on the family blog, I attended the inaugural RubyJax event last night. I have to warn you that I am easily excited, but the group is chock ful o’ some people I am excited about getting to know better.
One of the main reasons I made the decision to leave Symantec and the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was because I felt that the company was very stale from a technical perspective and I when I looked around at the opportunities if I were to switch jobs locally I would be forced into doing something that I didn’t love for the sole purpose of putting food on the table.
That type of work and I don’t mesh.
As my wife and previous or current co-workers can attest to (besides the short stints as a contractor for NASA and as C++ UI developer at Symantec… where I was bored out of my mind) I am a work-a-holic. When I am knee-deep in problem solving or developing something new, I loose all track of time and usually end up neglecting things I shouldn’t. So excuse me while I take this second to say thank you to my beautiful wife for understanding me, and putting up with it all.
That being said, I am extremely happy to be connected to Lark, Steven, Big Tiger, Obie, Chris, Desi and all the others 
(who I couldn’t find blogs for), and to have some people that will cause me, just being being in the conversation, to better myself.
And a BIG THANKS to Team Gaia for providing the location (even if it was on the wrong side of Jacksonville). And another big thanks to who ever it was that let me drink their beer, and paid for the Pizza, my turn next time.
Time to go make something useful in Rails.
Introducing McDonald 3.0
Just wanted to show off my son to you guys. If you would like to read more check out the family blog.
What the hell am I doing wrong?
I was reading QuadsZilla’s post about the week he is having on the SEO Black Hat, and have to admit that it sounds like I am going about this whole software development thing the wrong way.
We were even hanging with Wiesn Playmate Anna Scharl (Miss October for German Playboy) and her sister most of the time we were out; they’re both sweethearts.
Tonight I’m going to the Opera and tomorrow I’m doing some 3-hour caving expedition. Ahh, the life of a spammer. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.
I have been working in this industry for 8 years, working on web sites for reputable companies, making decent money. I would say that I would be the kind of person that any organization would want to have, but I find that I enjoy working at smaller start-ups, due to lack of waste more then anything, and I need a little more stress then your average person to get things done.
But if I can use my talents to startup some stupid website and just milk money away from Google and the unknown people out there, is there really a downside? Is it illegal? I can provide better for my family and not do something illegal. Why would I not?
My instinctual answer is that I wouldn’t want to do it for the sake of not helping to proliferate crap on the Internet. But (not that I would really want to) if spending 1 month a quarter coming up with some stupid website and then go spend time with my family and just watch the money come in… why is that not a good option?
I would love to hear from others that have had this same thought, and where they are on why the continue to work at a “real” company versus going out on their own taking advantage of the framework that Ad revenue has presented to us. 
————————
If you would like to find out more about Quadzilla, and a little insight into what makes him tick, listen to this interview that he did on Shoemoney’s Net Income Show.
(Note: that this is a picture of the Shoemoney guy not Quadzilla)
Coming Soon: New Baby for McDonald Family
As posted by my wife on our family blog, we are going to induce labor to expedite the arrival of our second child if he has not come by that point. We are very excited and can’t wait to share him with the world!
IBM offers Krugle, Koders search-off
As customer demands narrow-down, and the value you get from each engagement goes up, smaller, specialized vendors can gain a big advantage.
New look, once again
I updated my template with a free one that I found online. I had just updated my non-technical family blog template and saw this one while looking through a ton of options.
I like the search box that I had to plumb up and the category listing on the side. Blogger is getting better, but it is still behind some of the other blog services.
I am quoted in a Press Release
It is a nice feeling to have your company show confidence in you by unleashing you to be quoted in a press release. From the eMediaWire:
“Code search is a missing capability in TFS and SharePoint,” said Ben McDonald, product manager for the Koders Enterprise Edition. “Koders fills the gap and can help facilitate the transition to TFS from CVS, Visual SourceSafe or other legacy version control systems.”
This is actually pretty cool, and Microsoft showed some interest in using our product as a stop gap to their search solution for Team Foundation Server until they get one ready enough for prime time.
Refresh Jax: Social Media
I attend the Refresh Jacksonville talks, and admit I really enjoy them. I am by far the unhippest person in the room, as most of the people there are younger, better looking, design types, but I know soon I will have my moment to give a talk and blow their socks off. Until then I will just continue to go, drink beer, and create relationships with other local Jacksonville technologists.
The reason for this post is that I am looking forward to the upcoming talk given by Rhea Drysdale. At the previous Refresh talk on SEO she quite quickly established her expertise on the area, and a few of us ended up huddling up in conversation as the meeting began to wrap up and small groups began to splinter off.
If anyone out there is interested, you should plan to come on out and hear the talk, it is a great group of peeps to know and make sure to BYOB.
Press release: Koders Continues Innovation of its Groundbreaking Website
Koders.com now offers over 700 million lines of open source code aggregated from public repositories, corporate developer networks, and projects contributed by individual programmers. New additions to Koders.com include code hosted by Apple Computer, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. These corporate hosts join Apache, BerliOS, Debian, Novell Forge, OpenBSD, RubyForge, SourceForge.net, Tigris and other public code repositories indexed by Koders.com.
Beebe4 
1 comment