Raible Designs

[OSCON 2008] The Keynote

This morning, I woke up awful early to polish my presentation, walked to the train station and rode Amtrak from Salem to Portland. The commute was great: there's nothing better than traveling with power and an EVDO card + the option to get a cup of coffee. After getting off the train, riding The Max and walking to the Oregon Convention Center, I'm now sitting in the Keynote at OSCON. Here's my notes from this session.

10 years ago, leaders of the free software movement got together and tried to figure out a way to help people understand how to get access to software freedom. As they talked, there was a gradual meeting of minds. Finally, one person suggested "Open Source". A few weeks later, there was a larger meeting of people and they heard about this term. It was an idea that changed the idea of software freedom and what free software was. We've come along way since then. Last year, we heard about open source and and it trying to find identity in corporations. This year, we're hearing about corporations trying to find their identity in open source.

The official tag for this conference is: oscon08.

Tim O'Reilly
While this is the 10th Anniversary of OSCON, it's also the 12th Anniversary of the O'Reilly Perl Conference (where it all started). Tim began his activism with Perl when it got on the web. He was thinking about the internet and the online world, from the beginning (when many others were coming from Linux). Open Source was almost named "SourceWare". Tim believes his biggest contribution is bringing Open Source and the Internet together.

"Keep your History" - make the things you put online accessible for years to come.

When OSCON first started, it was all about the OS Wars. Tim is showing a shirt with the famous Ghandi quote on it about "First they laugh at you..." and it has a Linux logo on the bottom. It's seems ironic that Microsoft is now one of the major sponsors of this conference (my thoughts, not Tim's).

Open Source Technology in the Enterprise. IT jobs are 2.3% of all jobs posted, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Technology oriented companies (e.g., Google, Yahoo, Sun) make heavy use of Open Source (40% of all jobs posted by Y!). Open source is growing faster in non-tech companies. Of the open source technologies in the enterprise, the highest share of jobs is Linux (19%), followed by Perl, JavaScript and PHP. As far as the fastest growing, Django and Alfresco are at the top.

Three Big Challenges and Opportunities:

1. Cloud Computing
2. The (Open) Programmable Web
3. Open Mobile

Cloud Computing: Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, The Engine Yard, etc.

Jesse Vincent: "Web 2.0 is Sharecropping"

Danny O'Brien: "If we want people to have the same degree of user autonomy as we’ve come to expect from the world, we may have to sit down and code alternatives to Google Docs, Twitter, and EC3 that can live with us oon the edge, not be run by third parties."

Basically, Tim is saying the that cloud computing is great, but it doesn't fit well with open source. This is primarily because if you build on a cloud, you have to be careful not to get locked into that platform.

Data is the "Intel Inside".

The Web is the Internet Operating System - the subsystems will be data subsystems.

Locking in data: iTunes and Amazon's Kindle. On the other hand you have Yahoo's BOSS, which is doing the opposite.

We Need the Open Web Platform! Tomorrow's Keynote, "Supporting the Open Web" will talk much more about this.

The Mobile Web has caused the "browser wars" to resurface. However, big companies like Google are putting a stake in the ground and saying "We believe in open". Net Neutrality and The Open Handset Alliance are two of Google's smartest strategic decisions. They understand how much they depend on the open ecosystem.

When we look at our success in the last 10 years, we can be really excited. But what's really impressive is how much we (as an open source community) is how we've risen to new challenges and challenged the openness of new platforms and industries.

Christine Peterson
Christine is the President of the the Foresight Institute. Christine was the person who suggested the term "open source" at the meeting referenced above. Unfortunately, my first battery died as Christine was coming on stage, so I missed writing down the first 10 minutes of her 15 minute talk. She's talking about the openness vs. privacy of keeping US citizens safe. She started her talk apologizing for the ethnocentricity of her talk and moved to quickly note that the e-voting controversy wouldn't have happened if open source software was used.

"Who would have guessed that the folks with the pocket protectors would turn out to be the ones with the right stuff?" -- LA Times

Founding Geeks: Thomas Jefferson (mechanical geek) and Thomas Edison (electricity geek).

You can't just complain about things. The fear is real. We can't just complain about how DC is solving problems, we have to step up and solve them ourselves.

"No Secret Software for Public Sensing Data."

Dirk Hohndel
Dirk is the Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel. He's talking about Moblin: Linux for Next Generation Mobile Internet. This sounds like something that has been talked about a million times before. Why is it interesting today? Because we're at an open source conference and open source is what makes it interesting.

When people look at Intel, they don't think of open source. However, Intel is very involved in open source and uses an open source methodology internally for their development process. They also have one of the largest grids powered by open source (~100K Linux servers).

Moblin is about the internet, about mobility, about flexibility and extensibility. What's happening today is the ideas of 10 years ago have become affordable to produce (for manufacturers) and purchase (for consumers). There's lots of proprietary ways to develop the mobile web, but it needs to be open in order to prevent lock-in (to a platform) and encourage innovation.

A year ago, Intel started Moblin. Initially, there wasn't a lot of interest from open source developers. The majority of interest came from companies, particularly hardware vendors. To Dirk, this was disappointing as he really wanted a community to guide the project and make choices about the platform. There's lots of Open Mobile/Linux efforts out there, but there aren't any that are truly open - with access to the source code and everything else you'd expect from an open source project. Intel was hoping to announce a cutting-edge infrastructure for Moblin here at OSCON, but they're a few weeks behind. They hope to be ready for soon.

"The hope that I have is the community takes this from us. Show us where to go. Show us where not to go. Help us get this right."

Tim O'Reilly interviews Monty Widenius and Brian Aker
Tim asks how it's going 6 months in. Monty responds that he's very happy they didn't have to go public and that Sun is still trying to figure out what they bought. One of the things difficulties they've seen about encouraging Sun's engineers to be involved in open source is some are hesitant about open sourcing their code. The biggest problem is engineers are afraid of the feedback/scrutiny that their code will receive.

MySQL was very unique as a company in that it was a virtual company, with most engineers working out of their homes. MySQL has become an enabling force for moving Sun to a similar model.

Monty is working on Maria (new storage engine) and Brian is working on Drizzle (a slimmer version of MySQL). Drizzle was inspired by a conversation when Brian was talking to Rackspace's CTO.

"Do less and then create extensibility mechanisms." -- Tim O'Reilly

OSCON: Where are the good parties at?

It seemed to work pretty well for JavaOne, so let's try it for OSCON...

This week, the best Open Source Conference will take place in the beautiful city of Portland, Oregon. I went to high school just south of Portland (Salem) for a couple years and my parents still live there. Portland is one of my favorite cities, my parents are two of my favorite people and OSCON is one of my favorite conferences. Seems like an excellent combination for a really fun week.

I'll be flying to Portland with Jack and Abbie on Tuesday. Wednesday I'll be at the show speaking; Thursday I'll be there listening and likely blogging. I hope to catch a happy hour on at least one of those nights. Friday, my family and I will be heading to the Oregon Brew Fest followed by a night at The Kennedy School.

So when and where are the good parties at during OSCON 2008? Here's what I know about so far - I'll add to this list as comments start flowing in:

• Wednesday: RedMonk at Kells (8-10), OpenSolaris/MySQL/Zend at DoubleTree Hotel (8-12)
• Thursday: SourceForge Awards Party at Jupiter Hotel (6-9), BeerForge III at Bossanova (8-11)

As far as finding me at the show, it's probably easiest to follow me on Twitter.

Update: A reader e-mailed me about http://upcoming.yahoo.com/tag/oscon. This seems to be an excellent source of OSCON party information. I've updated the above list with the ones that look good on Wednesday and Thursday.

Apache 2 on OS X: Configuring mod_proxy and SSL

I recently had to setup Apache as a front-end web server for multiple backend servlet containers. The backend containers serve up different web applications, and the Apache front-end unites them from a hostname and port standpoint. The following instructions describe how to configure Apache 2 on Mac OS X to proxy requests to Tomcat or Jetty running on localhost:8080. It also shows how to enable SSL on Apache and force it for certain URLs in your Java web application.

Apache comes pre-installed on OS X, so you should be able to start it by enabling "Web Sharing" in System Preferences > Sharing.

$APACHE_HOME on Leopard is /etc/apache2. On Tiger, it's /etc/httpd. If you've upgraded Tiger to Leopard, it's likely you'll have both directories so make sure you're modifying the right one. I lost a few hours figuring this out, so hopefully this knowledge will appease some googler in the future.

Configuring mod_proxy

1. Open $APACHE_HOME/httpd.conf and add the following on line 480 - at the very bottom, just before "Include /private/etc/apache2/other/*.conf".

   #
   # Proxy Server directives. 
   #
   <IfModule mod_proxy.c>
       ProxyRequests On
       ProxyPreserveHost On
   
       ProxyStatus On
       <Location /status>
           SetHandler server-status
   
           Order Deny,Allow
           Deny from all
           Allow from 127.0.0.1
       </Location>
   
       ProxyPass    /myapp    http://localhost:8080/myapp
   </IfModule>

   ProxyPreserveHost allows request.getServerName() and request.getServerPort() to work as if there is no proxy server in place. In other words, even though Tomcat is running on 8080, request.getServerPort() will return 80.

2. The most important line is the last one as this is the dictates the location of your applications. Add more lines as you need to add more applications.
3. If everything is configured correctly, you should be able to run sudo apachectl restart and navigate to http://localhost/status. If you receive a "forbidden" error, make sure your /etc/hosts has an entry mapping 127.0.0.1 to localhost (as one of the last entries), or change "Allow from 127.0.0.1" to "Allow from localhost". If you get a "Server not found" error, you can tail the error log at "/var/log/apache2/error_log".

One issue I've seen with mod_proxy is when a request comes in and the backend server is down. When this happens, Apache returns a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable and it doesn't seem to go away after the backend server is restarted. It does resume proxying after a while, but I haven't determined what causes the proxy to come back to life. If you know a setting that forces mod_proxy to check for the backend server on every request, please let me know.

Configuring SSL

1. Open $APACHE_HOME/httpd.conf and uncomment the following on line 470:

   Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

2. Open $APACHE_HOME/extra/httpd-ssl.conf and change line 78 to:

   ServerName localhost:443

3. In httpd-ssl.conf, change line 99 to:

   SSLCertificateFile "/private/etc/apache2/ssl.key/server.crt"

4. In httpd-ssl.conf, change line 107 to:

   SSLCertificateKeyFile "/private/etc/apache2/ssl.key/server.key"

5. In httpd-ssl.conf, add the following after SSLEngine on to allow proxying via HTTPS:

   SSLProxyEngine on

6. Follow the Using mod_ssl on Mac OS X tutorial. For "Common Name/Server Name", use "localhost". You can download the source for mod_ssl (which you need at one point during the tutorial) at http://www.modssl.org/source/.
7. Run sudo apachectl restart and go to https://localhost. If you get a "Server not found" error, run sudo apachectl -t to verify the syntax of your config files or tail -f /var/log/apache2/error_log to verify there are no errors in the log files.

Forcing HTTPS for certain URLs
If you proxy requests from /myapp -> http://localhost:8080/myapp, request.isSecure() will return false. If you change it to /myapp -> https://localhost:8443/myapp, request.isSecure() will return true. I needed to figure out a way to have http://localhost/myapp go to http://localhost:8080/myapp and https://localhost/myapp to go http://localhost:8443/myapp. Even better, I wanted to configure things in a way so request.isSecure() returned the value based on the originally requested URL, not on the proxied URL. Configuration like the following would be ideal:

ProxyPass    http://*/myapp    http://*:8080/myapp
ProxyPass    https://*/myapp   https://*:8443/myapp

The solution I came up with is to standardize on secure URLs in my application. That is, use /secure/* as a prefix for all URLs that should be accessed via SSL. To follow this convention and force it, I added the following in my application's web.xml file:

<security-constraint>
  <web-resource-collection>
    <web-resource-name>Secure Area</web-resource-name>
    <url-pattern>/secure/*</url-pattern>
  </web-resource-collection>
  <user-data-constraint>
    <transport-guarantee>CONFIDENTIAL</transport-guarantee>
  </user-data-constraint>
</security-constraint>

Once this is in place, accessing http://localhost/myapp/secure/index.html will result in an error. Accessing it using https will succeed. Following this, you can change your ProxyPass rules to the following and all requests to /secure/* will be https; other requests will be sent to http. The order of the rules below is important.

ProxyPass    /myapp/secure   https://localhost:8443/myapp/secure
ProxyPass    /myapp          http://localhost:8080/myapp

If this isn't a good strategy for you, Tomcat has the ability to use a redirectPort (in server.xml) that auto-redirects from http to https when CONFIDENTIAL is used in web.xml. I'm not sure if this redirect will carry through values from a form post.

History Meme

From my 17" MacBook Pro that sits at home and I don't use much on a day-to-day basis:

powers:~ mraible$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
148 mvn
71 cd
46 sudo
40 ls
27 java
23 ll
17 svn
16 echo
13 vi
10 mate

From my 15" MacBook Pro that I use on a daily basis:

mraible-mn:~ mraible$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
83 cd
81 ls
79 sudo
65 mvn
39 mate
28 svn
19 vi
15 rm
12 open
7 tail

Nothing too exciting.

Proposal accepted for OSCON 2008

From an e-mail I received earlier this afternoon:

We are pleased to accept the following proposal for OSCON 2008.

* Web Frameworks of the Future: Flex, GWT, Grails and Rails

It has been scheduled for 16:30 on 23 Jul 2008.

My Abstract:

What if the choices in web framework was reduced to 4? If RIA are the way of the future, it's possible that these 4 frameworks are the best choices for this development paradigm. This session will explore these frameworks, as well as entertain many other's opinions on the future of web development.

RESTful backends are easy to create with both Rails and Grails. Ajax frontends are simple to create and maintain with GWT. Flex gives you flash and a pretty UI. If you're an HTML developer, Rails allows you to quickly develop MVC applications. If you're a Java Developer, GWT + Grails might be a match made in heaven. This session is designed to help you learn more about each framework and decide which combination is best for your project.

I'm really looking forward to learning about GWT and Flex in the coming months. If you have any experience (or opinions) about the abstract above, I'd love to hear it. The louder the better.

For those who haven't been, OSCON is one of those truly special conferences. Possible reasons:

• It's only an hour from my parent's house
• It's a beautiful time of year in Portland
• It's always the same weekend as the Oregon Brewers Festival
• It's a kickass conference with the greatest diversity of Open Source Committers

I'm going for all 4 reasons and even made a reservation to stay at The Kennedy School. Should be a fun show.

Selenium User Meetup Videos Posted

Videos of last week's Selenium User Meetup have been posted on YouTube. You can watch them below or click on the video to watch it on YouTube. Enjoy!

Lightning Talks

Q and A Session

Last Night's Selenium Users Meetup at Google

Last night, I attended the inaugural Selenium User Group meetup at Google's Campus in Mountain View. It was an excellent event, with many of the core committers on hand to present and answer questions. Each presenter had about 5 minutes to speak and we learned many things about the Selenium Project itself, what's coming in the future and how Google has standardized on Selenium as their integration testing tool of choice.

Patrick Lightbody started the meeting by going over a number of project statistics with pretty graphs and such. There were simply too many numbers to write down, so hopefully his slides will be published soon. I was pleased to see that Google did videotape the entire event, so it should be available online soon. I'll update this post when it it. Below are my notes from the event.

Jason Huggins, Test Engineer at Google
Selenium is a test automation framework. Some folks abuse it as a macro tool. There's two reasons Selenium became so popular: it was able to test Ajax before any other testing tool and it allows end-to-end workflow testing. Selenium works on any platform, with any browser and allows many, many languages. It's possible that other frameworks that are more focused are better. There are 4 Selenium products:

• Selenium Core (TestRunner)
• Selenium IDE (for Firefox)
• Selenium Remote Control
• Selenium Grid

Paul Hammant, Open Source Manager at Thoughtworks
Selenium 1.0 - beta this week. RC, Core, Grid and IDE together. 1.0 will be shipped in a few weeks. Compared to today, lots of bugs killed, documentation improved and a greatly improved Selenium IDE.

Selenium 1.1 will be shipped in a couple months. Selenium IDE will be enhanced to obey RC instruction ... becoming the best mode of operation when it ships.

Some experimental iPhone-Safari capability (dependent on SDK for iPhone).

Selenium 2.0 will hopefully be released this year. Roll in of WebDriver functionality and code. New model-based API. IE plugin and Safari plugin (not really a plugin, most likely uses AppleScript).

Philippe Hanrigou (http://ph7spot.com)
Testing is good! Selenium is awesome! However, end-to-end web testing is slow. It is and always will be slow. How do you solve this problem? You solve it the same way we've solved slow traffic in the past - by building more lanes. Rather than one browser testing everything, Selenium Grid allows multiple lanes and 20 browsers. Features include:

• Faster Builds, Faster Feedback!
• Easy Install and Everyday Use
• No Need to Change Your Tests
• Leverage Your Existing Computing Infrastructure

One of the best parts about Selenium Grid is you can download and have it running in 10 minutes or less. Selenium Grid comes out-of-the-box with Amazon EC2 support.

Jennifer Bevan, Lead from Selenium Farm Project at Google
As of Friday, Google has over 50 teams running over 51K tests per day on internal Selenium Farm. 96% of these tests are handled by Selenium RC and the Farm machines correctly. The other 4% are partly due to RC bugs, partly to test errors, but isolating the cause can be difficult. Selenium has been adopted as the primary technology for functional testing of web applications within Google. That's the good news.

The bad news is Google is pushing the limits of Selenium. Using Selenium (RC + Core) at this scale exposed certain issues not originally anticipated as high-impact. IE/XPath slowness has a high impaction given that can only run one test at a time. Tests can cause many conditions from which RC cannot easily or automatically recover (for example, tests that don't call stop() in every exit path). Unexpected browser dialogs, popups, etc. eventually cause timeout exceptions.

Googlers expect that RC will work for the most part, but they want it to be more reliable, with better performance. So they have:

1. Created utility methods to improve performance when examinging large tables, overlaying domain-specific languages, etc.
2. Deployed retry policies based on failure reason.

Looking to the future - Google has not yet reached their expected usage of Selenium RC. Some projects cannot use the Farm until RC supports session-level configuration (not server-level). Many just want RC to be more reliable. So Google will:

1. Continue to contribute to RC, Core and to user-created helper libraries.
2. Keep doing so until all failed tests are not Selenium's fault.

Dave Astels, Google (Driving Selenium with RSpec)
Using RSpec, you can create a very easy-to-read Story with Scenarios that can be read (and likely written) by practically anyone. Dave then uses a small script to load up the stories and run them in Selenium. When he runs the script, the scenario is spit out and test pass/fail information. Learn more at rspec.info.

Alex Chaffee, Mad Scientist at Pivotal Labs (The Selenium/Ruby Project that Must Not Be Named)
What is Polonium? It's also known as Selenium RC Fu or Selenium On Rails 2 or Funkytown. It has simple extensions to Selenium RC:

• wait_for
• element assertions
• launching/managing servers locally

Blackbox testing you're sitting out of the box and send in stuff. In whitebox testing, you get to open up the box and look at stuff. With Selenium, you can do Graybox testing, where you are doing blackbox testing (against the UI) and querying your database (or other resources) at the same time.

Dan Faulich, Sr. QA Engineer at Redfin Corporation (How Not to Run a Successful Open Source Project)
The first thing you don't want to do is support everything. The second thing you don't want to do is write your project in JavaScript. While it's great that almost anyone can hack on it, running in a sandbox sucks. Don't use a language that's bound by other people's security restrictions. Don't roll your own multi-language remoting. It's written using XML + XSLT and its such a pain in the ass to maintain that Dan is the only one that fixes bugs.

Shinya Kasatani, Developer of Selenium IDE
Selenium IDE is a Firefox extension that can record and play back tests in your browser. It can translate the recorded tests to many languages.

Selenium IDE 1.0 adds support for TestSuites. Another new feature is better recording features - it detects when the DOM is modified. Shinya has a demo where he uses the new IDE to test the Dojo Dijit Theme Test Page. Apparently, this doesn't work in the current version.

The Goal of Selenium IDE is to get more people interested in test automation of web applications and to help their projects to be successful.

Haw-bin Chai, Developer at CommerceHub
XPath is a powerful selection took, but it'd be great if we could use something like "article 5" instead of the cryptic //table[5]/tbody/... syntax.

Why UI-Element? Traditional locations can be ugly and they don't convey purpose. UI-Element is a Selenium Core extension and has Selenium IDE integration. It's written in 100% JavaScript. Examples:

ui=frontPage::topStoriesCountry()
ui=listingPages::article(index=5)
ui=listingPages::articleSource(articleIndex=1)

The UI Map is in JavaScript shorthand. It contains logic to map ui locators to traditional locations. Each UI element implements getLocator(), then you add a page set and add an element - all in JSON Format.

Simon Stewart on Web Driver
What on earth is Web Driver? One of the main problems with Selenium is it's written in JavaScript and it's too easy to hack. WebDriver is an idealized browser which allows you to do browser things like call get(URL), findElement(By.xpath()) and getTitle(). WebDriver is similar to Selenium RC, but it's not written using JavaScript. It's written in the native languages for each browser, which allows you to break out of the JavaScript Jail. The IE Driver is written in COM (C++). The Firefox Driver is written as a Firefox extension. Safari uses Apple events.

Soon there won't be a WebDriver project ... because it will be part of Selenium!

WebDriver likely won't be part of the core until Selenium 2.0 later this year. One of the nice things about WebDriver is you can implement different browsers. Out-of-the-box, it will support all the major browsers, as well as HtmlUnit with JavaScript turned off.

I had a great time learning more about Selenium and how most of its problems will be solved in the near future. The beers afterwards weren't so bad either.

Update: Videos of this event have been posted.

Dynamic Language Shootout: Groovy vs. Jython vs. JRuby

Travis Jensen has an interesting post titled Our Dynamic Language Shootout:

...
For a variety of deployment reasons, we've decided that whatever we choose will be deployed on the JVM. As a result, this comparison is for the JVM versions of the languages, e.g. JRuby, Jython, and, of course, Groovy, which has no other deployment option. I want to also clarify that I have the most experience with Python and I really like the language. There is no doubt that the language influenced me in my evaluation, but I really tried to remain objective in spite of that.
...
As I did the evaluation, I tried to come up with a broad spectrum of important information. Others at my company gave feedback on the important characteristics. In the end, these are the features that we felt were most important: the interaction between Java and the selected language, the IDE support, the learning curve, existing web frameworks, and the existing community support for the JVM implementation of the language.

His conclusion: Groovy.

I don't think it should surprise you at this point that we chose Groovy. Even being openly biases towards Python first and Ruby second (hey, it's cooler :), I could not, in good conscience, choose either of them for melding into our existing environment.

If I were starting from scratch on a project, my choice would be very different. If I wanted to target the JVM, I would choose JRuby (at least until Jython 2.5 and Django are available); if I wasn't targeting the JVM, then it would be, for my Python, but I'd be equally comfortable choosing Ruby.

Well written Travis - I look forward to reading more about the new life you're breathing into your stilted development practices.

Denver Tech Meetup, Consulting Panel and My Jobs Timeline

If you live in Denver and are involved in open source (or simply technology in general), you should make it a point to attend tonight's Denver Tech Meetup. I'm planning on going for about an hour. From there, I'm heading over to the DeRailed User Group for a Consulting Panel at 8. If you're interested in moving from a full-time position to contracting, you should come. This is open to the public, so anyone can attend.

While I was thinking about things to talk about on the panel tonight, I started reflecting on the jobs I've had in my almost-11-year career in technology. Here's my timeline since college:

1. 1997: Full-time at MCI Systemhouse
2. 1998: Contractor for IBM Global Services (6 figures w/in 6 months of graduating!)
3. April 1999 - April 2001: Full-time for eDeploy.com (Friday lunches rocked)
4. May 2001 - October 2001: Contractor for Douglas County (introduced to Ant, Struts, etc.)
5. January 2002 - November 2002: Contractor for OnPoint Digital (100% remote)
6. December 2002 - August 2003: Contractor for Comcast Media Center
7. August 2003 - October 2003: Contractor for ResortQuest
8. November 2003 - June 2004: Contractor for Adams County
9. June 2004 - August 2004: Contractor for Open Logic
10. October 2004 - December 2004: Contractor for Oak Grove Systems
11. January 2005 - May 2005: Contractor for Xcel Energy
12. June 2005 - January 2007: Contractor for Virtuas
13. February 2007 - June 2007: Contractor for Checkerboard
14. July 2007 - Present: Contractor for LinkedIn

Phew - that's 14 jobs in 11-ish years! Notice that I've only ever had 2 full-time positions. So far, I have no regrets and really enjoy being a consultant. If you're interested in learning more about how I started Raible Designs or how I get contracts, you might want to read the following posts.

• How I started Raible Designs (Nov 2002)
• How do you become an independent consultant and get contracts? (Jan 2005)

If you live in Denver and want to learn more - show up at the The Hive at 8:00 tonight.

Update June 2008: My 3rd full-time gig started in May. Now I'm the Lead UI Architect at LinkedIn.

Denver Tech Meetup: January 24th at 6:30

From the RedMonk Social Planner:

Why our holiday decorations are still up, I couldn’t tell you, but I do have the answer you’re all looking for: the date of the next Denver Tech Meetup. You remember, the Denver Tech Meetup? The User Group without the User Group? But with beers? Denver’s least ambitious monthly(ish) (ha!) gathering of technology workers?

Yes, I’ve failed spectacularly in my ambition to hold these things every other month, as was the expectation back in 2005, but I’ve been a little busy. And as I’m fond of telling our clients, a percentage of something is better than an entirety of nothing, right?

So ignore the inset picture - I posted it merely for nostalgic reasons; two Thursdays from today we’ll convene at our probationary new venue (my bartending friend is now way uptown) and frequent Jabber hangout, the Celtic. 18th and Blake, for the Denver folks in the audience. Still very easy walking distance for yours truly, not to worry.

Let’s you and me cram as many Tech Meetups in as we can before I flee back east before the hell that is the Denver summer. If things break as I hope they will next week and the week after, it’s possible that I’ll have my own not-so-captive audience to drag along.

See you at the Celtic. No Smithwick’s, sadly, but there is Murphy’s.

It's shaping up to be a good month for meetups: Silicon Valley next week, Denver the following. I'm participating in a Consulting Panel at the local Ruby on Rails user group that same night. Hopefully they won't mind if I have a couple cold ones beforehand.