In an hour I’ll be out doing late night trivia in a bar in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Pop trivia has never been something I excel at, but with the right company it’s fun to wager a guess, or two, and let go of the problems that consume idle cycles. As of late my thought has been switching between any of the following:

• Using virtual machines and shell scripts to achieve the Ultimate Small Team Software Engineering Environment ™
• Real Software Engineering in PHP
• Trees, Recursion, Permissions, and Architecture of my company’s next Content Management System
• How to simplify internals and increase functionality of the Recess Framework by leveraging PHP 5.3’s new features like anonymous functions and namespaces
• A big client integration project that deals with scary acronyms like HIPAA

This space should be more lively than the ghosttown that it has become over the last 8 months. More off the cuff writing on the topic of the hour than the more structured pieces I’ve been writing for New Media’s Web Development Blog or the Recess PHP Blog.

To kick that off the off the cuff writing, a few words on _why. I don’t know _why, I haven’t read the poignant guide to Ruby (although I’ve come across it a number of occasions and been intrigued), nor have I used much of his huge body of open source work. None the less his recent disappearance has been sitting really funny on my stomach. Really funny. This guy is prolithic, talented, and obsessed with teaching the art and joy of programming. I didn’t fully appreciate _why until watching his recent talk at Carnegie Melon [embedded below]. His excitement and creative knack for opening programming up to a younger audience is energizing. Here’s to hoping an even brighter chapter to that story is about to unfold…