How could I forget the title?

Fortunately for me, it’s been a very quiet week. We’ve had minimal issues from the client launch last weekend. We’ve found a couple of things to cleanup, but nothing major. It made my trip to Dallas for the weekend a lot more sane not always having to constantly look over my shoulder, or in this case, looking at the Nagios Tactical Overview, to make sure everything was going ok.

When I arrived into DFW on Thursday to start the meetings, I was on my way over to the hotel when I saw a black cloudwall. I tweeted later:

Thoughts on returning to DFW: I really miss being able to turn on @powerfm on the radio; I don't miss storms that turn day into night

— Darin Pope (@DarinPope) October 1, 2009

But like all Texas weather, all you have to do is wait 5 minutes and it will change. This storm was no different. Again, I don’t miss that kind of weather.

My meeting with the Broadleaf Commerce team went really well on Thursday and Friday. I’ve got a few things to do to help contribute to the project now. I’m going to be creating some screencasts discussing installation and configuration along with doing some code review.

One of the other things I’m going to add (at least in isolation for now) is some RESTful web services so I can use BLC as my web service layer for the upcoming Charlotte JUG presentation titled “iPhone Development with RESTful Java Web Services”. If you are in the Charlotte area on October 21st, please be sure to drop by for the presentation.

One of the other tasks for me is to integrate BLC with Terracotta. As you know, I really love what Terracotta provides. For websites, you can start as simple as session failover all the way through fully clustering Hibernate. I think for the first pass, applying the KISS principle, I’ll get session failover working. Once that works, I’ll let the core team let me know which way to go from there. I think that it is going to be a fun project to work with and will stretch my thinking in a number of areas.

I’m looking forward to a couple more client meetings from now through Monday along with seeing friends I haven’t seen in about a year. Then, back to the airport late Monday to return to CLT. I really do love what I do.

I’m still on the search for the language or product to learn this year. I was initially leaning toward Ruby, but now I’m not so sure. I’ve got some other people telling me Sharepoint. Not sure if I’m ready to go back to a Microsoft platform or not 🙂 Either way, you have a suggestion of what my next language/product is that I should learn, leave it in the comments section below.