Mile
Zero

...is ridiculously busy. Class at SCCC has ramped up, I've been prepping for the University of Washington workshop, and of course I've got my everyday work at ArenaNet as well. In lieu of a more substantial post, here are some quick notes about what's on my plate.

• The homepage for the news apps workshop (now formally COM499B at UW) is located here. It's not terribly comprehensive yet, but my goal is to update it with my presentations, things that I mention during class, and in-class work as I go. In other words, it's not a textbook, it's a record that students can refer back to later. I'd welcome suggestions for other additions to it.
• While uploading the COM499 page, I accidentally overwrote the root index.html on my portfolio, which led to A) a panicky few minutes finding the Google cache of my page and recovering it, and B) the realization that I had no way to recreate my portfolio page, now that it's not generated via Blosxom anymore. As Mike Bostock wrote in his ode to Make, automating any production process is important because it formalizes things, and makes them reproducible. After an hour's work or so, ThomasWilburn.net is still a static page, but it's built from a template and a Node-based recipe, so I'll never lose it entirely again. Once I've cleaned things up a little, I may open-source the tool for other ex-Blosxom users.
• Caret will break 30,000 users today or tomorrow. This is, to be honest, mind-boggling to me. The last time I wrote about it here, it had 1,500 users. Since that time, I've added a ton of new functionality, accepted contributions from other developers who want to help add features, found out that members of the Chrome team are actively using it (although, I assume, not to write Chrome itself), and filed several bugs against the chrome.* APIs. Caret's my daily editor for class work and personal projects, and I'm incredibly pleased by how well it compares against Sublime and other native editors.
• Dates have been locked in for Urban Artistry's Soul Society festival in DC this year: April 14-20, with the main event toward the end of the week as usual. We'll be adding specific event schedules in the next couple days, so keep an eye out.