This Friday, our little team is getting together for a “Learn Android” Hackathon. As it turns out, we’ve also recently had a spin evaluating HipChat. You can see the synergies developing right? So, given that HipChat has a rockin REST API, I thought I’d put together a little bit of JavaScript that ties up all the loose ends and gives me a nice mile-high display for displaying HipChat messages on the team plasma. And thus [...]

After recently reading “The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains“, I’ve been a bit provoked about how much time I waste online when getting things done. Chasing hyperlinks to all kinds of content, checking twitter, get distracted by mail. Major context switching! So I’m experimenting with a new workflow where I disable the network card on my PC , and just come online every few hours to clear the mailbox.  It’s been [...]

It’s a little-known fact that I’m a part-owner of one of the most uncool Grails startups in the known world. We don’t have Webscale issues, we don’t have staff beanbags,  in fact we don’t even offer a cloud-based solution. We install Grails-based software on hosts inside corporate environments. We do compliance software. Like Health and Safety and IT Security stuff. Nerdy in the extreme. But also very fun to work on, and, shock-horror, a sustainable [...]

Building on last year’s effort, I’ve been spending some time with the Pragmatic Thinking and Learning book to start thinking about my knowledge portfolio for the year ahead. I’m still not entirely clear on the fine print, but there are some themes that are really starting to run in my thinking, so I figure I should get accountable and blog it up. Here’s my stab at the tech areas I’m interested in getting across in [...]

I went through a tech goal-setting process last year, and found it pretty help, so I’m lining up for another Tech Goals plan in 2012. I commend the process to you! First let’s review last year’s list: JavaScript – Yup! I can certainly tick this one off. Did several pieces of hardcore JavaScript work for clients (some without framework support), learned enough QUnit to be dangerous, and even did a bit of Backbone.js. Android/HTML5/CSS3 – [...]

I’ve had a great couple of days at OSDC 2011! Tuesday I was hanging out at the First Ever Australian GR8 Conference, spent Tuesday night with the CJUG boys, then have been presenting today on PhoneGap to the broader OSDC conference. Great times! Interesting this is definitely one of the hardest core developer communities I have hung out with. Hardly any Macbooks/iPhones in sight and Linux laptops and Android phones everywhere! People are really committed [...]

I’m really looking forward to hanging out with the crew at osdc2011 next week in Canberra, and have been busy working on my sample code for my talks. I’ll be giving a talk titled, “Fake Your Way as a Mobile Developer Rockstar with PhoneGap” where I’ll be talking a little about a recent client project I was working on developing for iPhone,iPad,Android (phone + tablet), Blackberry, Playbook and WinPhone7. It was a true “write once, [...]

What a fantastic time we all had at SpringOne 2GX in Chicago over the last week. My head is jam packed full of information and I have so many new things to add to my list of cool Groovy tech to explore! If you’ve never made it to one (this was my first), I can highly recommend it! First things First: Relationships trump everything The absolute best part of these events is the chance to [...]

I’m just putting the final demo together for one of my sessions at SpringOne 2GX called “Does my DIV look big in this?” This talk brings together a whole bunch of technologies that I’ve been experimenting with for a while that help keep your view tier DRYer, namely: Grails Resources (for shrinking your dependencies) Various Grails and non-Grails DRY view technologies (including bean-fields, navigation, validation and other jQuery related goodness) Less.css for keeping your CSS [...]

If you’re having troubles with the Bean-Fields plugin on Grails 2.0.0.M2, there’s a quick workaround to get up and running. So if you see something like… Caused by GrailsTagException: Error executing tag <bean:form>: Cannot get property ‘class’ on null object You know you’ve tripped the issue. I’ve logged the issue in GPBEANFIELDS-40 but the root cause is actually not beanfields at all. It’s a breaking change introduced in Grails 2.0.0-M2 for performance improvements (GRAILS-8001). The change [...]