What a weekend.

So just a couple weeks ago, I had an empty plate. I was looking for projects and things to fill my time.

Well, I found some.

ThoughtWorks had its away day this past weekend in Chicago and it was quite possibly the most inspiring weekend (work wise at least) I’ve ever had.

I’m sitting here at the airport in a daze, exhausted and excited. On my ‘plate’? you will now see :

• A book on DSLs – Joe O’Brien and I are going to be pairing on a book. My first. We’re still nailing down exactly what it’s going to be about, but this is pretty damn exciting. I’m going to be an author
• Chizzle Reborn – Jon Tirsen and I are going to take another crack at writing an open source ruby IDE. No wxWindows this time though, this one’s going to live in your browser. I’ll be blogging more about this later, but after a week of spiking, we’ve pretty much proven that we can make it work.
• DSLs by example – I gotta get myself talking again, so I’m putting this talk together to get myself back on the conference circuit
• Working with BD in Seattle – I like Seattle, I’d like to keep working there. It’s about time I get up and do what I can to help ThoughtWorks sell some work there.
• Working with Microsoft – They’re not that bad. Seriously, though, I’ve volunteered myself to help out with MS stuff seeing as how I’m in Seattle these days.
• Going to OZ - Julian Boot is using Rails to do some pretty amazing things with a client down in OZ. We’ll see if he can get me out there for a month or so sometime this year.
• Pairing on Quickstart Training – Luke Barrett is teaching a course in a month or two on this pretty amazing new service offering TW has. I get to help him out with it.

So that’s basically the rest of my year right there

The book story.

O’Brien pulls me aside as I’m walking to a breakout session and asks me if I want to write a book with him. He says it’s about DSLs and I basically love the idea. Keep in mind that I just met the guy a week and a half ago, but we paired on code together and talked a lot. He’s good people.

So we go downstairs and start brainstorming on index cards right away and Neal Ford joins us. Not only an author, Neal’s been giving talks about DSL’s at No Fluff lately. Then Rebecca Parsons just happens to sit down with us, she proceeds to give us all kinds of great ideas that the three of us hadn’t come up with yet. Then of course Prag Dave sits down at our table, and yes he’s been looking for a book on the subject. And yes we should get him a proposal right away.

Wow.

…and that was just 2 hours out of a weekend that blew my mind. Damn. It’s good to remember the kind of company I work for

Well I’ve been busy, stuff I’ve been working on that I’ll hopefully be posting more about include :

• Playing with Jetbrains MPS – it’s their LanguageWorkbench, and it’s nice, very nice. If you’re totally new to the whole space, you’ll probably find it a bit frustrating, as it’s still very early days of the EAP and it’s a bit rough. But, for me, I’m coming to it from someone who’s wrestled w/ a lot of the problems that MPS has already solved, and it’s refreshing to see their solutions. More Later…
• Playing with JackRabbit – this is a java content repository. Something like this is the perfect foundation for a language workbench to be built on top of. More Later…
• Starting AddressBook – this is a .net port of OSX’s Address Book. I’m pretty close to releasing version 0.1, so next couple days you should see a download available here. I’m already using it for my addresses, and it’s so much better than outlook… More Later…
• Intentional in Budapest – I’m in Europe right now, working with the Intentional team in Budapest after taking 2 weeks vacation in Sweden. I know, rough life.

…of course you’ll probably be needing that new e-mail :

= jeremystellsmith@gmail.com

creative, no?

Anyway, I’m sending out a huge mass e-mail to pretty much everyone in my address book. So if you don’t get it, and you think that you should be IN my address book, shoot me an e-mail. (and if you could include a picture in that e-mail, you get bonus points )

And yes, it’s cool. I have my shiny new 12” powerbook and I’m very proud. I have all the mac user friendliness (yeah, a company that actually THINKS about user experience, weird, huh?) and I have the power and robustness of unix underneath. I’ve never admin’d a unix/linux system after my weekend long bout w/ linux ~ 7 years ago. This is a great way to come back to it.

I just got gaim going – which involved installing X. Which, now seems way straightforward. But it took a good few days of hacking and reading websites to figure out what I actually wanted, and how to get it, etc, etc. Definitely the open source experience I have had w/ windows seems childlike compared w/ the stuff that’s around for unix. Open source is pretty freakin’ cool. Apple has a project called !DarwinPorts which is kinda like cygwin but for systems running osx. It does all the compiling and stuff for you, and better yet, it does all the downloading and downloading, compiling and installing of dependencies for you too.

Anyway, I’m pretty happy w/ my new toy. There’s still a few things that I’m not quite happy about, or that I haven’t figured out yet – but give me another month and I think I will never be able to use windows again.