Starting Back Up

2009-02-28

Over the last eight months or so, my blog about software development at Salesforce on Rails, has been criminally neglected. The cause has been twofold. First, I’ve just been incredibly busy, but that’s a tired and lame excuse. More significantly, I’ve largely stopped working with Salesforce.com and the Force.com development framework, for reasons I’ll get into later. So Salesforce on Rails is now retired, and I’ll instead be blogging about software development here at LuigiMontanez.com. Old entries from Salesforce on Rails will be migrated below this one.

So LuigiMontanez.com is now my place to blog about software development technologies, and also about becoming a better programmer. I’ve been heavily into the idea of software craftsmanship lately, facing the harsh reality that I have enormous room for improvement as a software developer. I’ll still blog about the intersection of potitics and technology at Leftmost Bit, so please do grab that feed if you’re interested.

What’s next for LuigiMontanez.com? Well, in addition to sharing my efforts on becoming a better software developer and project lead, I’ll be blogging about these technologies that are currently piquing my interest:

• Ruby and Rails
• jQuery
• CouchDB

I’m also planning to participate in the Apps for America contest put on by Sunlight Labs. My submission will harness Open Calais and the various government transparency APIs, creating a tool to allow users to clear the fog about some of the non-obvious connections between our elected officials, special interests, and the laws and policies coming out of government. It’ll be called Defogger.org.

Compelled by the contest’s spirit of transparency, I’ll be blogging the entire app development process right here, from start to finish. With the contest deadline set for March 31, I certainly need to get started on the project sooner than later, and what better way than to force myself to blog about it on a regular basis.

Stay tuned!