Missed it by *that* much

Looks like I missed the chance to have an "I'm not dead" post on the three-year anniversary of my last post. What a shame.

 Since that last post, things have changed, as they do. New job, new child, new skills...

 I still aspire to make my mark in the computing world, dashing back and forth between various projects over the last three years, and foolishly never finishing one.

  My work with Windows Phone development has been on hiatus for a while, mainly because of other projects that came along and drew away my attention, but more recently because the focus in that industry is now on Windows Phone 8, of which I have neither a handset nor a machine that is capable of running the development tools. I still think the platform is fantastic, and fully plan on returning to it, as other projects yearn to reach multiple platforms.

  I took part in the MintChip Challenge, but because of time, and the fact that I was determined to submit my entry on a not-quite-supported platform, I didn't complete a submission in time. It's an interesting technology, and it was a fun project to be part of.

  I'm currently involved in The Loom game engine community. This is a growing community of talented game developers of varying experience, and the small team at The Engine Co. are a friendly and bright bunch. I'm hoping they go far, and hoping to take advantage of the Loom engine in the near future, not just to ensure I take full advantage of the promotional free year license I currently have.

  I've been attempting to stick to Agile development practices for my personal projects, even when the project is a team of one. I've fully moved to and embraced git, if for no other reason than because everyone else is doing it. I'm a branching fool, now. And I've hopped around a variety of issue and task management tools, settling currently on the Atlassian suite, with JIRA, Greenhopper for Agile, and Confluence for document management. I used to be a written-on-a-pad-of-paper guy for keeping track of bugs and future features, and while I'm not 100% disciplined, I'm definitely finding these tools help direct me more efficiently than before.

  As for new technologies, they just don't stop coming. I've been staying atop the latest in ASP.NET MVC development, and love the Entity Framework for tying together my data and my front-end. I've enjoyed diving into TypeScript, Microsoft's bridle for Javascript. With it I've finally gone beyond the simple onClick snippets of Javascript use to some large-scale projects, most powered by Node.js. I've still not gone head-first into any of the popular JavaScript libraries out there, but I've dabbled with a few and have a lengthy set of bookmarks to return to when I'm ready to overpower a web front-end.

  There are lots of technologies on my radar that I've not given enough attention to. I finally gave Ruby a look after years of scoffing, only to realize it's a sane Python, which makes it good in my books. I still want to give F# a try, but have yet to find a project that I could/should use it for. Same goes for Scala; it's getting popular, and while I've read the reference and am intrigued, I've not found the need to put it to use. I recently learned about SignalR, which I wish I had a few years ago for a variety of defunct/hibernating projects.

  I learned about SignalR during one of the numerous JumpStart courses over at Microsoft Virtual Academy. I'm not sure how long that's been around, but I'm miffed that I didn't know about it sooner. The range of material and the quality of the courses there are fantastic. The ASP.NET MVC course had something interesting or useful in every portion. I've joined a few local user groups and have been attending their seminars, allowing me to keep up on other new technologies, ranging from server platforms and virtualization to multiplatform mobile development (Xamarin). I've also been watching a few of the Pluralsight videos I have available through my work MSDN subscription, but the majority of them aren't as advanced as I would like or need.

  Getting my own MSDN subscription, including a bit more access to Pluralsight, is what I'm hoping to do soon via the BizSpark from Microsoft. This program helps startups get a leg-up with free tools, training, resources and community, including access to Azure. For a while I'd been giving The Cloud a "yes, yes, storage and services on the net - very nice" tone of dismissal, but after finally poking around Amazon AC3 and Microsoft Azure for a bit, I'm finally on-board with needing and wanting such services, especially for my current project. The fact that my old Linux machine finally died, leaving me with one less option for self-hosting, certainly helped drive me to finally looking into the hubbub around cloud services.

  Other than that, I've still not done as much as I'd like on Android or iOS, which I'm hoping to change soon. I had had big plans to get apps onto the Windows Store early, to take advantage of that early period; some might argue that Windows 8 RT hasn't gotten the traction to say that it's beyond its early period, in which case perhaps there's hope. And Blackberry 10 -- had time permitted I would have liked to get in at the beginning there, too, especially with the incentives that they were giving for app developers. Not that I'm convinced that the platform will survive, but early adopters still needed some apps to download, and it would have been nice if I could have provided something for them. It was confirmed that Xbox One will welcome development by indies, which is an appealing thought, but I'm reasonable enough to know that, for now, that platform is a bit out of my reach unless I can become a full-time indie developer.

  As you can see, I've certainly not been idle, but this blog sure hasn't supported that. Time being what it is -- lacking, fleeting, etc. -- the little I do find for personal projects goes to learning, planning and development right now, which means that writing, such as the blog, just gets neglected. As many have said, I hope to post more often, but really, will you believe that before you see it?