What is the saying? "The only thing that is constant is change..." Sure enough. I had been working with a young start-up called BookRenter.com with a couple of really bright young engineers but alas the business wasn't generating sufficient revenue to keep me on so... I took a contract with a company in San Francisco. It feels kind of like a reunion of sorts, the VP, Andy Felong was at Walmart.com while I was there and the Sr. Architect is Dorothy Gantenbein who I worked with some time ago at another start-up. To top it off, Trudy Reese is joining them at the end of the month.

My new client is a provider of educational tools, curriculum development, assessment and not sure what else. They are re-engineering the application and needed someone to help bootstrap the QA effort, so here I go again. It will be fun and pay the bills but I haven’t forgotten that I have my own project to get back to. Oh and to make it a bit more chaotic, I am taking another short contract with a former client in Denver to help them evolve their QA process as they grow their team in Bangalore.

Today I am boning up on Xen virtualization. I want to run multiple servers on a Dell PowerEdge SC1430. Greg Joe and I experimented with this last year and now I want to roll it out for production in BearBlu's environment.

I will let you know how it goes...

The Countdown Begins...

It all started harmlessly enough; I had been recently separated from the company that was paying my bills so I decided to build a new application that I felt had value... but what? As is usually the case you stick to what you "think" you know. I was a "QA / Process Guy" not a technology guru. So I started thinking about the tools I used daily and what I liked and disliked about them; could I make them better? Perhaps not but I might be able to make them more usable for the average end user and surely I had enough experience to help others. With the help of my partner in crime, we set off on this journey.

The world of developing web applications is very different from the client-server and embedded applications I developed more than a decade ago. New technologies have emerged, SOA, Ajax and the explosion of Open Source tools and applications presented me with a personal challenge to learn to program again.

In the next few weeks, my partner and I will be revealing the Beta version of our efforts. We hope you check it out and let us know what you think of it and if you can see value in it.