the relaunch

I have rebooted this blog many times over the last several years. If you’ve been a reader of my blog in the past, you will have noticed significant changes. If you’re new here, welcome!

This reboot has been in the works for several months now, even though I’ve probably spent far less than 24 active hours working on it. Life as an “itinerant” consultant and conference speaker is extremely busy compared to what I was doing on May 16, 2012 (the date of my last blog posting). At that time I was in the middle of a transition from 3+ years as a front-line manager of a software development team into a lead software architect role. Since that time I’ve changed jobs (careers?) twice:

• June 2011 - February 2012: During this time I was titled as a “Technical Architect” at AutoZone’s corporate offices in Memphis, TN. My focus was the modernization of their retail store management system architecture and technical stack. While there I also did a fair amount of agile coaching.
• February 2012 - Present: In January, VMware came calling, wanting to know if I would join the vFabric Cloud Application Platform PSO as a Senior Consultant. After a few weeks of interviews and careful consideration, I made the jump. I’m now in the midst of helping a Fortune 50 company build a brand new “private cloud” hosting platform for their next generation of application development.

During that time I also significantly increased my participation on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour. In other words, I’ve BEEN BUSY.

At any rate, I have for quite awhile now wanted to get back into the practice of writing. However, I’ve wanted to do so outside the constraints of a hosted platform like Blogger or WordPress.com. Those systems place far too many constraints on how your blog works, and they also happen to be the only place that your data is housed. Sure, I could write my posts in Vim and then copy/paste them into the platform, but that’s annoying. I wanted to manage my writing using a plain text editor, mark it up using something lightweight like Markdown, check my writing into version control using Git, generate my site using a tool like Jekyll, and then push my site to the cloud. What was the easiest way to achieve all of this goodness? Octopress seemed to fit the bill.

So, what you now see is the result of my labor in migrating from WordPress.com to Octopress, hosted at Heroku. One day (perhaps) I’ll write up the process that I used. It was a bit convoluted and involved gigantic piles of yak hair, so I’d rather not consider that piece right now.

What I will be focusing on quite a bit is the idea of simplicity. For more than a decade I have wandered through the barren wasteland that is accidental complexity in software. A few months ago I viewed Rich Hickey’s keynote session at StrangeLoop 2011 entitled “Simple Made Easy”. It is Rich’s definition of simplicity in software that has inspired the brand new title of this blog, wherein I will chronicle my continuing quest to seek out simplicity in software structure.

Alas, it is time to return to billable work. I shall endeavor to post again in far less than a year. So, as we say in the south, “Ya’ll come back now, you hear?”