Well I didn’t manage to get in on the newly Christened holiday proper, but I have finally gotten around to participating in Jeff Blankenburg’s Contribupendence Day initiative, the gist of which was to log in to your professional networking website of choice and give 5 or more recommendations to folks who deserved them.

I’ve only gotten three in so far, but I feel as though I’m in a difficult position. I’m a year out of school, and most of the folks I’d like to recommend are senior to me, are or folks who have given guidance or perspective without directly working with me on a project, and it’s that “we worked together” sort of recommendation that the networking sites are built to assume, and probably with good reason. I’ve still a couple of guys who I worked with a while back who deserve being recommended, I just need to come up with novel and work-appropriate ways to say, “he’s really good at getting beer and wings,” which, as we all know, is as valuable a workplace skill as any.

I haven’t made a “real”¹ first post yet, but I have more or less settled on a design for my new, mostly technically-oriented blog. Personal-life type things will find their way in here as well, but certainly the intent is to write about development- and team-related topics. Whether good or bad, I tend to bring as many or more social and inter-personal skills to the table as I do technical ones, and I intend to talk about things such as team dynamics, communication styles, and effective relationship management techniques in the context of the ongoing march toward production.

The other item I want to note at the moment is that I haven’t remotely finished filling in the blogroll links yet. There are a ton of great developer/bloggers I’ve come in contact with or come across, and the folks currently linked to represent the links easiest at hand when I was working out the design. I’ll be continually adding links, if nothing else than to at least show my support for writers I’ve found to be good or helpful.

(And also to help me remember to go through them all regularly. Which might elicit the response, “Use the RSS Reader, Matt!”, but as someone who finds appeal in visual esthetics and envies the ability to create a good design, I’ve always been put off by using a reader other than as an actual news aggregater. And even then, I prefer to visit the source site to read an interesting article. The graphic designer for Ars Technica, for example, didn’t put multiple months into a redesign for me to just strip all the pretty out with a reader. YMMV, of course.)

Here’s hoping this is the beginning of many decent digressions into life as an upright code monkey.

Random, unsorted mini-list of songs I’m currently feeling:

• police on my back - the clash
• muscle’n flow - menomena
• the ice of boston - the dismemberment plan
• start all over again - locksley
• you are invited - the dismemberment plan (again)

No real reason for putting this up but for more testing, in particular testing of formatting. Edit: Formatting which, I note, doesn’t seem to exist. Oh, to investigate or to defer? Edit2: Too simple a fix to ignore.

This is an example Ruby snippet:

def HavingFun? ()
  @lang == :ruby
end

…and here’s a C# one:

public bool IsHavingFun
{
    get { return _isHavingFun; }
    private set { _isHavingFun = value; }
}

… both styled by the WP-CodeBox plugin.