A New Look!
I've been quiet for a while. I didn't publish a new post in a few weeks. It wasn't because I got lazy or because I ran out of ideas or experiences worth sharing. I was really busy.
As you probably know I've quit my job last year and since then I'm working as an independent. It couldn't have been better so far! I've got involved interesting projects, I'm working with smart people and I enjoy it a lot. But... as an independent the workload may vary a LOT, especially at the beginning. So, I've been through some very busy weeks.
The Blog
One of the things I've been busy with, was this: to give my blog a new look. I like writing here my ideas and my experiences. I also find it imperative in our job to always be up to date with the technology and part of this is done through reading blogs. So, I want to continue to give something back by writing about my work and by sharing my ideas here. Beside this, I enjoy it a lot when I hear that some of my posts are mentioned and debated in various places. All these motivate me not only to continue writing, but also to invest in making the overall blog better.
The first thing I wanted to do was to give it a proper name and to move it from a free Wordpress account. I've settled at On Code Design (oncodedesign.com was also available :) ). I wanted a name that sets the theme of the blog. I'll continue to focus on practical ideas rooted in real live projects, about how to structure the code to maximize the chances of success. So I think that the new name fits this theme well. Until now, I've had a lot of influence from building software in the large organizations, and now since I'm very much anchored in the start-ups challenges this may be completed with another perspective. In the future, I'd also like to have guest posts on code design from colleagues or friends whom share same values with me on software quality and good practices, and who can bring different views in this space.
The next thing, after getting rid of the ads that came with the free account, was to give it a more modern look. Because web design isn't my thing I've asked the help of professionals. Together with my very good friends at Dali Media we've came up with this theme, and as it happens when designers get involved, with a logo :).
I've also decided to migrate from Wordpress to Ghost. I didn't do a research or comparison in depth, but after reading about some other tech bloggers experiences, Ghost seems a good alternative for getting away from Wordpress issues and complexity. At first I wanted to go with Ghost Pro and take the SaaS advantages, but after I've seen that their price grew from 8$ / month (when I've first read about it on Troy's Hunt blog) to 26$ / month in just a few months, I've decided to host it myself on an Azure website.
...And, after some weeks of hard work on it, this is the end result. I hope you'll like it! (and that Wordpress redirects from my old blog work well :) ).
MIRA
Refreshing my blog was't the only thing that kept me busy from writing posts in the last weeks. Another big thing that happened was our (iQuarc) partnership with MIRA. We've worked with the MIRA co-founders for a few months last year, and we've easily concluded that a partnership between MIRA and iQuarc would be highly beneficial for all parties, so it happened. Therefore, in the past weeks we all did a hard work to re-architect and implement their core product preparing it for the cloud and for being sold at a large scale. I think more writings inspired from this product will come in the future, because it has some nice technical challenges and I enjoy a lot working with the guys at MIRA.
Training
Another thing that kept me busy was restructuring my Code Design training. I wanted to put in all the good feedback that I've collected along the years. More about this in a new post. (I promise not long from now :) )