Remote Synthesis

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to write and blog more - and that doesn’t mean just on technical topics but also on topics I am generally interested in. I just need to get in the habit of writing more, generally speaking. Anyway, any of you who know me know that I am a big fan of music. In fact, until about mid-2013 I was doing a bi-weekly Internet radio show (called Vitamin Sweet) focused only on new music. If you’d listened to that show you might Charli XCX in Februrary of 2013, Foxes in May 2013 and Lorde...…

Most of us deal with the “community” in our jobs on some level or another. Perhaps we are an engineer on a product that has a community of users, or work for a company that has a community of customers, or, perhaps, are in a position to be part of the public face of a company, product or service who is tasked with communicating with the community as part of your job duties. …

This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the latest Boston Festival of Indie Games at MIT. This was the third year of the event and my second attending. This year, as last, I attended with my two boys (ages 8 and 12). Here are some thoughts on the event and some of the games that I, personally, found interesting. …

As some readers may know, for five years I ran a small (about 350 people) conference here in Boston. Originally called Flex Camp Boston (and obviously focused on Flex), it was renamed RIA Unleashed and subsequently Web Unleashed. The event still exists, run by FITC and occurring this September in Toronto. …

Recently I had the chance to attend QCon NY. Actually, I was fortunate enough to be on the programming committee and to lead a track there. My track was called “Beyond JavaScript” and one of my featured speakers was Dr. Axel Rauchsmayer speaking on ECMAScript 6 (i.e. the next version of JavaScript). I was very excited that Axel was able to attend all the way from Munich, as he is well known expert on ES6 (and author of the new book “Speaking JavaScript”). …

As part of researching for restarting this blog as well as for my work developing the Telerik Developer Network, I researched several of the most well-known static site engines. Specifically, I tried to build this site using Jekyll (which is what I ended up using), Harp and Roots. These were the three engines listed prominently on the StaticApps.org resource site. I really think that many sites, especially those focused purely on content, can potentially move away from dynamic, CMS-driven site architectures that can be a burden to maintain, to purely static HTML with a “back-end” that generates the site locally....…