So I’m sitting here in Midway airport in Chicago. Kinda bored really so I thought I’d throw out some random crappy post because really, there’s probably not enough of those on the Internet.
I’ve been rather busy recently, traveling to Anaheim, Washington D.C, Las Vegas, Orlando, Chicago, and I’m shortly going back to Las Vegas.
Why am I doing all this travel? For my day job, and let me tell you I have the best job in the world. I get to work with completely awesome people like Mike McGarel and Devin Olsen. I’ve got the best manager in the world in Declan “Super Tech” Lynch and above him is John Roling, an awesome PHB! Our company does some incredible things, but that’s for another post I think.
Our development platform of choice is XPages. Why? Because it works and works well. We literally run out business on applications developed with XPages. We can and will use other tech when appropriate of course. We’re not blinded by XPages. But for the most part it’s been clearly the best tool for our needs.
My part of this and the reason for my heavy travel of late is I’m building Inventory tracking applications. I’m still using the Notes client a bit but that’s going away to be replaced with XPages only functionality. I big piece of this are screens specifically designed for iPad. I have a blue tooth scanner that works great and it’s used to track inventory and assist is in shipping and receiving operations. I’m doing a ton of mobile development – not all of it great yet as I feel my way through things like mobile controls, bootstrap, etc. I have a lot of people using this app and a lot on iPads. So far they seem really happy and we’ve tracked and shipped a LOT of material. Yay!
Let me just say that putting my core business logic inside Java Beans has been an absolute life saver. But we’ll talk about that later.
So I’ve been traveling to not only train various locations in using these applications but also learn about how each location is different. What their needs are… what works for them… what doesn’t. It’s been great though I am looking forward to just being home and getting back into development.
Outside of the day job the extra travel has prevented me from going to IamLUG and I probably will pass on MWlug. I do want to get back to the Lugs but want to hang with the family as much as possible right now.
On the NotesIn9 front – this has slowed down the shows of course. It’s kinda been a problem since last year. The end of the DriveTo99 then IBM Connect then the day job stuff has created a backlog. So it’s taking me a long time to get shows from contributors out. I’ve never had that kind of delay before and I do feel bad about it. I think I still have 2-3 shows in the queue from Brad Balassaitis and Paul Withers to get out and then I THINK I’m caught up but need to go through all my dropbox directories to make sure I’m not missing anything. So hopefully Ni9 will pickup in a bit after this last scheduled trip in a couple weeks.
Next week I’m doing an OpenNTF webinar with Marky Roden. I’m really looking forward to it but need to finish up what I want to talk about and demo. It’s a “Getting Started” topic so it’s geared for beginners, but maybe there will be something intermediates might have missed.
So that’s my story. Oh yeah… I did get a Chicago HotDog
Oh and before I sign off I do want to give a huge shootout to Jesse Gallagher from iknowsomeguys.com who’s helping me with a pet project. Don’t miss his blog at http://frostillic.us
Great… looks like the plane is a bit late. Sadly it’s too noisy to do a NotesIn9.
So yeah, I love what I do, and what I do is XPages!
Have a great weekend everyone!