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I was inspired by Brian McClain’s post on bringing Haskell to Cloud Foundry using Cloud Foundry v2 buildpacks, so I decided to go on a buildpack journey of my own. Since Clojure is the language I most enjoying “toying around with,” I thought I’d try to deploy a simple Clojure web application using the Heroku Clojure Buildpack. To reiterate some of the coolness around buildpacks, they are what allows a PaaS like Cloud Foundry or Heroku to support various runtimes without first building that support into the core platform.

Wow…it seems I only post to this blog toward the end of May. Well, that all changes now. You see, as of June 3, 2013, this blog is going to become one of many aspects of my new “day job.” On Monday, I start my life as a Community Engineer with Cloud Foundry by Pivotal. What’s a Community Engineer? Quite honestly, I’m not completely sure of the answer to that question yet.

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).

For those of you that don’t know, I recently returned to the technical ranks as a Software Architect after a three-year stint in management. To make a long story short, I now love my job again. Perhaps I’ll write the long story in a future blog entry. On to the topic at hand. Today I led the first significant design discussion that I have led in quite a long time. A few minutes afterward, I was already reflecting on what had occurred and how.

I completed an interest survey for a potential Selenium-focused conference several weeks ago, and I’m excited to let you know that the “powers that be” have decided that the conference is going to happen! I have already submitted my “Executable Specifications: Automating Your Requirements Document with Geb and Spock” talk as a potential session. Whether it makes the conference program or not, I plan on attending the event. Here are the details:

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health: The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever. Crunchy numbers A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats. A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,600 times in 2010. That’s about 16 full 747s. In 2010, there were 15 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 115 posts.

Today DZone released my first Refcard: “Selenium 2.0: Using the WebDriver API to Create Robust User Acceptance Tests.” I have been interested in writing a Refcard for a long time but have never pulled the trigger. For whatever reason, I decided to jump on the bandwagon last month. Writing this card was quite a challenge, as it’s difficult to boil down a big topic into only six pages while keeping it useful.

I’ve been really quiet on this blog lately. There have been multiple reasons for that. I’ve been extremely busy preparing for conferences this Fall including SpringOne/2GX and The Rich Web Experience. I’ve also stayed busy writing for DZone. I have my first DZone Refcard coming out soon, which is focused on Web Driver/Selenium 2. I’ve also been writing my regular articles for Agile Zone. Here’s a roundup: Modular Agile: Loosely coupled, highly cohesive ceremonies

In late September I completed an eight-part article series for Agile Zone entitled “The Seven Wastes of Software Development.” This series discussed Mary and Tom Poppendieck’s mapping of Shigeo Shingo’s “Seven Wastes of Lean Manufacturing” into the software development world. This has been a very popular series, having been viewed a total of 57,887 times at this writing. Here’s a set of links to the series: The Seven Wastes of Software Development - Introduction Waste #1 - Partially Done Work Waste #2 - Extra Features Waste #3 - Relearning Waste #4 - Handoffs Waste #5 - Delays Waste #6 - Task Switching Waste #7 - Defects

I recently completed a series of articles for Agile Zone entitled “The Agile Guerilla.” Those of you that have seen me on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour this year may recognize a talk by the same name. They are one and the same concept: my attempt to reach the masses with strategies for introducing change, specifically moving to agility, into organizations from the grassroots level. Here’s a list of the complete set of articles for your convenience!