Mike Brittain

2008 has been a great year of expansion for me. I got to work on some amazing work at Heavy, and am continuing in some of the same themes at CafeMom. I’ve worked with some of the best developers I’ve met, and work on another great team now. One tsp., a project that has been rattling around in my head for over two years, is finally live and slowly growing (as time permits). There have been countless side projects and options dangled before me in the last six months which have all been interesting, but also distracting. And finally, my wife and I are looking forward to our first child who is expected to arrive in just a few more weeks.

It’s a lot.

As we roll over to 2009, I look forward to focusing on a shorter list of priorities. First and foremost, getting this new family off the ground. Second, I look forward to making a bigger mark at work and completing a long and exciting list of projects I have planned there (stay tuned here for more details and results). I have additional Japanese classes lined up, and hopefully will progress into a casual speaker in the coming months. Finally, I have lots of plans for One tsp. and hope to again find time to work on that project.

All told, this feels like a big list, but I always have my hands in a few pies at once. The point will be not to find any new pies.

So if you’re calling to tell me about your new startup, my answer is: “check back with me in 2010.”

Thanks to everyone who has made this year so memorable and successful both professionally and personally, especially my wife.

I really love the irony of using a postcard from the “Quarter Pounder” restaurant in Tokyo as a bookmark for “The Omnivore’s Dilema.”

…at least, I think it’s ironic.

I just read this short article about Soocial’s hosting architecture which runs on Amazon Web Services.  There was one particular line that echoes what I’ve been saying for a while and I think it is worth repeating:

One of the most interesting things is how the architecture isn’t dramatically different than it would be if you were to build an on-premise version.

In my own experience with hosting on EC2, we built our application on a physical dev server that we already had in place and was running Linux.  It was easy for us (with just a little forethought) to deploy the application on EC2 and S3, and the developers working on the application really needed to know very little about the workings of EC2.

I normally get a good handful of personal emails over the course of a week from recruiters interested in my resume.  This week I’ve noticed an uptick in emails from technical recruiters, and not personlized emails, either.  Over the last 3 days, I’ve received five email newsletters from recruiters — some who I am familiar with, and some I have never heard of.  Seems like the recruiting industry might be hurting and that everyone is really casting their nets wide to find any interested candidates or companies who are actually hiring.

Anyone else seen this?

The Economist is running an article on netbooks, with specific advice on sticking to Linux as the operating system — rather than buying a beefy netbook that can run Windows.  I’ve been trying to avoid looking at these for a long time, thinking that when I get one, it will probably be an Apple.  But alas, Apple doesn’t have a netbook or tablet computer yet, and it’s difficult to predict when that will become available.

The sub-$500 price tags make current netbooks relatively cheap in my mind, and potentially disposable should the technology improve significantly in the coming months.  Much harder to call a $1500 computer “disposable”.

Most of what I would want to do with a netbook is pretty much what you should expect to do on a netbook: surf the web, send email, open documents and spreadsheets, and maybe some very lightweight development — which is, for me, typically Linux-based work.  Email and web can already be done well in a browser.  More of my own docs and spreadsheets are in a browser now, too, by using Google Docs.

And, hell, from what I can tell, Google’s “Chrome” web browser (along with its suite of web products) is the play for making the browser more important than the operating system.

It might be time to start taking a closer look at these.

At long last, there is CalDAV support in Google Calendar so that it can properly sync with Apple’s iCal.  This has taken so long that I’ve pretty much moved completely into using Google Calendar 100%, and don’t even bother opening iCal.  In the end, that’s what I believe Google wants — total reliance on web-based apps.

In any case, the announcement was made a few days ago on Google’s Mac Blog.  There is a small app that Google is distributing for making the setup process super easy.  I’m going to give it a shot and see whether this will get me using iCal again.  It certainly would be nice to have this calendar available on my iPhone, especially when I’m somewhere that Google Calendar won’t load due to lack of network connectivity (which seems to happen pretty often for me).