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20091105 Thursday November 05, 2009

Consulting, SOFEA, Grails and GWT at next week's Denver JUG Next Wednesday, I'll be at Denver's JUG meeting to talk about Independent Consulting and Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT. The first talk will be a a panel discussion among local independent consultants, including James Goodwill, Matthew McCullough, Tim Berglund and myself.

This session explores the trials and tribulations of an independent consultant. How do you find contracts? Should you setup an LLC, an S-Corp or just be a sole proprietorship? What about health insurance and benefits? Are recruiters helpful or hurtful? Learn lots of tips and tricks to get your dream job and your ideal lifestyle.

The Grails and GWT talk is a preview of a talk I'll be doing at the Rich Web Experience in December. Below is a rewrite of the abstract in first-person.

Earlier this year, I participated in a major enhancement of a high-traffic well-known internet site. The company wanted us to quickly re-architect their site and use a modern Ajax framework to do it with. An Ajax Framework evaluation was done to help the team choose the best framework for their skillset. The application was built with a SOFEA architecture using GWT on the frontend and Grails/REST on the backend.

This talk will cover how Bryan Noll, Scott Nicholls, James Goodwill and I came to choose GWT and Grails, as well as stumbling blocks we encountered along the way. In addition, we'll explore many topics such as raw GWT vs. GXT/SmartGWT, the Maven GWT Plugin, modularizing your code, multiple EntryPoints, MVP, integration testing and JSON parsing with Overlay Types.

If you're in Denver next Wednesday night (November 11th), you should stop by the Denver JUG meeting. It'll be a fun night and there's sure to be a few beers afterward. ;-) Posted in Java at Nov 05 2009, 10:52:37 PM MST 5 Comments

Happy Birthday Abbie! Today marks the 7th anniversary of Abbie's Birthday. Happy Birthday Kiddo!

Abbie at 7

I have to say that this year is quite a bit better than last year, especially since I got laid off on her birthday last year. ;-)

To commemorate this special occasion, I pulled out some pictures from the archives. Here's one of her and I on her first weekend, as well as her first cheerleader outfit.

Abbie and I on her first weekend Abbie's First Cheerleader Outfit

To see how Abbie has grown up over the years, see past Happy Birthday posts: #1, #3, #4, #5 and #6. Posted in General at Nov 05 2009, 11:22:06 AM MST 2 Comments