All quiet? No. Stand-up comedy imminent…

I haven’t posted for a while, clearly.  Why?  Real-life happenings – new job, new girlfriend, both at the same time.  Life is currently rather good.

The new job is as a developer at Onalytica.  I’m still figuring out precisely what it is I’m working on, though, and exactly what I can blog about in reference to it.  I can tell you it’s a great change, however; just the fact that I’m now working in a team where everyone is in the same room is a massive improvement!  Suffice to say I’m enjoying myself immensely.  We’re hiring, by the way; currently looking for a quantitative models researcher and an internet-scale data-centre Windows sysadmin.

I’m putting in some effort on IncludeCombiner, so I can get to the stage where I can contribute it to MVCContrib; the idea is that it’s a drop-in, turn-on kind of toy for people doing ASP.NET MVC websites.  ”Oh, I need to improve my site’s loading times; what’s the easiest thing I can do?  Ah!  Turn on CSS/script minification/compression/caching!” kinda thing.

I’m also gradually working on rake-dotnet, though here I’m incrementally fixing issues that come up during real-life use at work and on IncludeCombiner.  Kyle Baley wired it up to Codebetter.com’s TeamCity instance recently, and once the latest rake-dotnet gem is installed there, I should see the first green build (“It works on my machine!” dammit! ;-) ).  Next on the list to-do is Gallio support, NDepend support, more NCover reporting support (since the nice people at NCover granted me a license for this, I kinda feel obligated!) and a few bits of friction-elimination like detecting where 3rd-party tools are installed when they’re not present in source-control.

I’m also preparing for my first ever round of stand-up comedy; I’ll be presenting rake-dotnet at the forthcoming Skillsmatter event on 16th June in London.  I’m quite excited about it.  It won’t just touch rake-dotnet (since the point of the library is “working build script in 30ish lines of code” I don’t think that will take awfully long!); I’ll see if I can work in a demo of wiring a project up to TeamCity continuous integration, since that’s (CI, not specifically TeamCity) most of the point of having a one-click build in the first place.