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