Hello WordPress!

In the several months since I first started blogging, I have enjoyed using Mephisto. It’s a nice blogging tool and was a great way for me to play around with a bonafide Ruby on Rails application. However, thanks to my new job at a Rails shop, I will soon be getting all the Rails action that I need on a daily basis without any need for an alternative outlet.

In addition, I have found the almost complete lack of activity on the Mephisto website disconcerting. I understand that the developers of Mephisto are busy and that Mephisto is just a side project for them, so it’s not that I expect anything from them. It’s not as if I or other Mephisto users are paying them for the wonderful work that they do. At the same time, I don’t feel comfortable producing a growing body of blog posts here at the wrathful dove on a system that may simply stagnate should its developers lose interest in further development.

For this last reason, I have been toying with the idea for several months of switching my blogging software. I have considered Typo and WordPress on numerous occasions. WordPress seems the obvious standard by which other blogging software is judged and is a fine product, but every time that I considered moving to WordPress, I ran into a roadblock that I had constructed for myself: I wanted a playground for Rails development and so was committed to maintaining my blog in Ruby. Thus, instead of WordPress, I focused my attention on Typo.
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A New Job

Most of my small group of readers are probably aware by now that I have tendered my resignation at NewEnergy Associates, the software company that I have worked for over the last nine years. My friends and family know that for many of those years I was deeply unsatisfied with my career path and with the work that I was doing. That all changed over the last three years, and I had finally found a place at NewEnergy where I was doing things that made a difference and where I enjoyed my work.

So for once, I wasn’t looking for another job because I was satisfied with the one I had.

Naturally, that is when opportunity came knocking on my door.

A friend of my wife put me into contact with the owner of a startup that was looking to hire a Rails developer and within two weeks of our initial contact, I made the decision to leave NewEnergy and join Systino to do Rails development work.

Working for a startup company will be both exciting and challenging, but that’s just part of the fun. On top of it, I will get to do the web development work that love and get to work with my favorite programming language Ruby. Finally, Systino is an Mac company and so I will be getting a nice new MacBook on which to develop.

Needless to say I am thrilled and can’t wait to get started next week.

In the mean time, today starts my last week with NewEnergy. In some ways, it is sad. I will miss the many wonderful people that I have come to know over nearly a decade, but this opportunity was something that I would always regret not taking and I think the time was right for a change.

Hello Mephisto! It’s About Time

At some point in August last year, I found myself bitten by the blogging bug. However, being the somewhat neurotic perfectionist that I am, it has taken this long to finally get to writing a first post, and I still don’t have things the way that I like.

Despite the fact that there are a plethora of sites online that offer blogging services for anyone itching to publish their thoughts to the world, I decided that seeing as I run my own Gentoo Linux server at home, I would go through the trouble of setting up my own installation of a blogging tool. I figured that it would be a fun learning experience and that I would also enjoy the advantages of a fully customizable blog with no worries about having to rely on some corporate server to safeguard the stuff that I write. Call me silly, but I like having full control over my own data – especially if its going to be a journal like this one. Continue reading →