Gaslight & Steam

After some time running this site under Joomla! with the blog being handled by WordPress, I’ve finally switched over to only use WordPress. Although I like the features of a full-fledged content management system and Joomla! has some great features, it was both a little more heavy-weight than I needed and the maintenance tasks to keep it up-to-date were taking away from other work that I wanted to do. In particular, even though I’m using the excellent Now Reading Reloaded plugin to manage my library (after switching from the original Now Reading plugin), it’s no longer being updated and there are some features that I’d really like it to have. Unfortunately, the way the plugin is architected, I’ve come to conclusion that I’d be better off writing a new plugin, particularly if I wanted a less hacked-together way to store authors as separate entities in their own database table. My library has also grown to a size that I’d like to better be able to paginate results and other things like that.

Meanwhile, I’ve temporarily removed some pages, so if you’ve come looking for them, my apologies. I’ll be adding things back along with more things besides in the coming weeks. If you notice something missing and care to offer constructive feedback, I’d be happy to hear from you!

As a tool for professional networking, LinkedIn does many things very well, but I’ve never found lists of contacts or friends (a la Facebook) to be particularly compelling. Over at LinkedIn Labs can be found some tools and experiments that look to expand what LinkedIn is capable of. I finally had a chance to play with LinkedIn Maps (requires a LinkedIn account) and the results are striking, as an at-a-glance look at who you know and how those people relate to each other. There’s some odd outliers, but it’s pretty obvious in my circle who worked together with me at each company.

And while you’re at it, if you need a resume, you can easily generate a nicely formatted resume from your LinkedIn profile.

Turns out I keep much the same daily schedule as Ben Franklin without the long lunch.  More or less.  I thought that, “early to bed, early to rise” meant going to bed by 7 PM or something.  Turns out it’s more like 10 PM.

Here’s Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Routine and there are plenty others on this site that make for some pretty interesting reading.

I enjoy reading Steve Yegge’s blog. In his most recent post, he said:
“Even if nobody were to read my blog, the act of writing things down helps me think more clearly, and it’s engaging in the same way that solving a Sudoku puzzle is engaging.”
“You should try it yourself. All it takes is a little practice.”

Truer words were never said. At least for me, this is very true. I was thinking about the difference between the items I commit to this blog and, since I’ve started, I found it not only helps me organize my thoughts (much like a good project retrospective or post-mortem should), but it also gives me a sense of purpose and energy. I keep notes on projects, I have libraries of code snippets and save all manner of links and other electronic ephemera for my personal reference. But by discriminating among them, winnowing out the chaff and selecting particular items to polish and post, I gain new perspective on the work I do. And, like Mr. Yegge, even if no one ever reads this blog, I find it worthwhile. But you should read Steve’s blog – it’s quite excellent.

You have found the blog for GaslightAndSteam.com, the development blog for this site. Posted here can be found technical snippets, musings on web development, software methodologies like Agile, the various technologies I use and other random mutterings.