Sean Mountcastle

My how time has flown. It’s been four months and a day since I last blogged and I need to get back to it. By now I’ve probably lost all of my subscribers and NetNewsWire doesn’t even recognize it as a dinosaur (I guess that means my blog’s turned into oil — yay for me with it nearing $100/barrel).

I have several unfinished posts stuck here in WordPress and several more rattling around in my head. For those of you who are still hanging around, here are some of the topics:

• The Advanced Ruby Studio (I attended this back in July).
• How to distribute your Ruby app without giving away your source code.
• Performance tuning a networking application (in C).
• Developing for mobile phones (specifically the iPhone and Google’s Android).
• Game programming in Ruby (with and without Rails).
• Interviewing technical candidates.
• Startups.
• Book reviews.

I should never try to make major changes to anything right before a holiday because it will most definitely break.  So when I switched over to FeedBurner last Wednesday, I completely broke the feeds to my blog.  Luis de la Rosa, a fellow Mac and Ruby/Rails developer in the Washington, DC metro area (who is also an entrepreneur, see Happy Apps, LLC), notified me of the issue but I wasn’t able to login and resolve it until this morning.

So the feed should be working fine now (through FeedBurner, so I can track my readership). Please let me know via the comments if there are still any problems.

In an earlier post I mentioned that I had to place this blog offline for a bit. That was because I was looking for a job and any company that I’d want to work for would be savvy enough to google me and find this blog. Thus I didn’t want my previous writings interfering with my job search. I had what I believe is an excellent process for my job search which I’d like to detail in another post, in fact there are many things I want to post about related to my short break. I also took the Sean & JoEllen Mountcastle Foundation and Pyralid offline temporarily too. In the case of Pyralid, I stopped the consulting work when I accepted my new job (though the two products/services under development have been handed off to my business partner).

Here are several of the topics I need to blog about soon:

• my job search process
• tips for landing your dream job
• the list of local start-ups
• local qualified investors
• local companies working with Ruby
• my interview with Electronic Arts
• my consulting experience (with Pyralid)
• my product/service development experience (with Pyralid)
• my side-project to build a game using Ruby on Rails

Well, I finally decided to dump Typo. I was headed for Mephisto as I’ve been hacking on it quite a bit recently. But I decided that I may post more frequently if I didn’t start playing with the source code to my blog everytime I want to post. Thus I’ve switched back to WordPress which originally powered this site (when it was known as sean.mountcastle.org). I’ll post shortly about why my blog was ‘down for maintenance’ for the past month and I’ll also be working to get the old posts from Typo imported here.

I’ve finally gotten around to setting up a blog, it only took me four years.