Last week, I had the privilege of attending my first RubyConf. I really enjoyed it. There were a lot of great talks, and I got to meet with many friends (new and old). I went with a group from Zeal, my new employer, which was an interesting change. In the past, there might have only been one other person from work with me at a conference.

Cincom’s Visualworks Smalltalk 8.0 has been released. While I’m part of the developer program, I hadn’t had a chance to ensure that all of my open source tools still work in the new version until just recently.

My family has lived in our current home for more than 13 years now, longer than we’ve lived anywhere by a decade or so.

I’ve been an Emacs user off and on for something like 25 years. I started using it when I was programming Common Lisp as a university research assistant but stopped for a number of years during my sojourn into Windows-land. When our team decided to build the next generation of our product on Linux back in 2001, we looked around for a usable C++ IDE and couldn’t find one. So we decided to run with Emacs and have been using it regularly ever since.

I am excited to announce that I have accepted a new job. After 13 1/2 years at Key Technology, I have decided to switch gears and move to Zeal. My last day at Key will be October 31, 2014 and I’ll start at Zeal on November 3, 2014. That’s right, a whole weekend of funemployment!

The video of my Golden Gate Ruby Conference talk, Gilding the Rose: Refactoring Legacy Code, is now up on Confreaks. I hope you enjoy it!

One of the things I enjoy is building tools that support my team and make us all more productive.

My recent talk at GoGaRuCo is about refactoring legacy code. The talk is based on the Gilded Rose code kata, which is a really fun kata to try. I highly recommend setting aside a few hours to play with it. There are variants of the kata in a number of different languages.

Last week, I attended the last-ever Golden Gate Ruby Conference in San Francisco. The conference organizers announced at the conference that this is the last year for this conference.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at RubyConf 2014, November 17-19 in San Diego. I’ll be presenting “Affordances in Programming Languages”, an updated version of the talk I did at Mountain West Ruby Conference earlier this year.