Java Drive

I bike to work since mid-April now and I am wondering how long I will be able to do so. The days are getting shorter, sunset is about 7PM right now. Plus it gets a bit cold in the mornings now, which might make me switch to the car next month.

Still, I am biking since mid-April. The weather here in Sunnyvale, CA, was extremely stable. I cannot remember a single day I was not able to bike to work because of rain. Not a single day… compare that to most of the rest of the world.

The final meters on my way to Yahoo! even leads me to ‘Java Dr’, so my brain already adjusts to the upcoming work :-) Wondering where Groovy Dr and Grails Dr is…

The Beast is out!

As the 2GX in San Jose was postponed, Glen and me felt like we can release the beast, aka as the Grails Podcast website, right away. So here it is, surf over to grailspodcast.com and enjoy! Most of the old content, except the polls, were transferred to the new database. We also started tagging our content now, this means we can give you special views like ‘all interviews, etc.

Right now the page still forwards to our mor.ph appspace, where we host the whole app, but I can add a CNAME forward the next days. Feed URLs and everything else should meanwhile still be good.

I guess the grails podcast website itself will become my new playground for whatever plugins and features I want to try out… I might though use another dev account on mor.ph (which is free for dev, you only pay when it goes into production) just to not risk bringing the site down for too long.

For commens or suggestions you can either skype or email me directly or just use our grails.podcast@gmail.com email address. Oh, and please follow us on Twitter (grailspodcast) for updates on groovy and grails!

Prost Neujahr!

So one year has passed now since we entered the US. I have been home about one day for the quickest transatlantic visit ever since then, besides this we were all here, in Sunnyvale, CA. It was not always easy, especially the first few months but – in general – things have stabilized somewhat and we just extended our lease, too. So what is my summary for the first year?

It was a rush, really. Time has passed so quickly, we have done and had to do so many things that often there was not time to think much about it. We met our first US friends that by now already moved away back to Minnesota (hope to visit Jen & Kyle next year), I survived the first Yahoo Mobile Winter (winter is the toughest time because of trade shows in January to June…) and my wife eagerly studies English and is doing pretty well.

Visitor’s season is just over. Our parents have visited, many of our friends and a lot of people I knew in the (mobile) IT sector came by. It’s nice to be in the Bay Area,  the silicon valley is regularly visited by most of my business friends which makes it nicer for me personally because every week or so someone you know comes by.

The Grails Podcast has also evolved quite a bit. When we arrived in the US, I was able to quickly produce some more episodes before there was a really long break. Luckily, Glen Smith contacted me and we continued the podcast together. It turns out this was an awesome idea an I enjoyed podcasting since then even more. He is now on the show and the feedback and download figures are pretty positive.

Talking about the Grails Podcast, I am working on a new website as our current podcast hosting isn’t quite the sexiest one. It will be a mixture of functionality and also my own playground for whatever plugins I want to try out in a real life project.

So far I used the excellent Feeds Plugin and the Authentication Plugin from Marc Palmer and also the JCaptcha Plugin for listener comments from Octo in France (who exactly has written the plugin?). We will definitely talk more about what we have used in the SoapBoxes (our part of the grails podcast for in depth discussions) coming up.

So watch out the next few weeks and cu at our first live podcastint event in San Jose, CA, during 2GX in October!