Blue Sky On Mars

• Web Application Security
  Joe Walker gave what looks like a great talk about web application security.
  (tags: ajax CSRF security webdev javascript)

• 10:35 on vacation and have a cold. bummer. #
• 10:50 wow. control-M lets me select menu items on the Mac using the keyboard. i can’t believe i never found that before. #
• 13:44 @sillyevar of course you can also use Quicksilver to find any item on any of the menus with minimum keystrokes #

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• 09:47 @benbangert heh. i didn’t have a pic handy. i plan to fix that this weekend… #

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• 20:53 @benbangert good to see you twittering #

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• Repoze
  A project to open Zope technologies to folks using the WSGI stack in Python.
  (tags: python webdev wsgi)

I’ll be speaking at CodeMash for the second year in a row. At CodeMash ‘07, I did an introduction to TurboGears.

At CodeMash ‘08, I’ll be doing an overview of the Dojo JavaScript toolkit. Dojo is a comprehensive and powerful package, so I’m going to do what I can to highlight nifty things the package can do. I’m going to work under the assumption that people who attend this talk understand JavaScript, but that’s really the only pre-req.

CodeMash ‘07 was a remarkably well run conference, given that this was the first year. It’s a great conference to show off technology like Dojo, because there is a very diverse audience. (That’s the whole point after all: bring people from different areas together… .NET, Java, Python, Ruby and JavaScript all in one conference!)

I’m excited to announce that starting November 5th, I’ll be working for SitePen. Never heard of SitePen? That’s not surprising. But, if you’re involved in web development, you’ve likely heard of the Dojo JavaScript Toolkit. Alex Russell, Director of R&D at SitePen, is the leader of the Dojo Core project and SitePen’s CEO, Dylan Schiemann is also a JavaScript fiend who has been involved with Dojo for a long time.

I responded to Alex’s blog posting for a “Sweet Gig”, which is indeed a very cool and unusual opportunity. I met with Dylan and Alex out in Santa Clara just before AjaxWorld, which I unfortunately couldn’t attend. A couple days after our meeting, Dylan offered me a position that, for me, is even cooler than the R&D sweet gig.

People who know me or have read my blog for some length of time know that I’m a “product guy”. If you look at SitePen’s website, you’ll see that SitePen is a web consulting business. I’ve done that kind of work in the past, and while there are plusses to that kind of business, it’s not what I like to do.

Dylan has opened up a slot for me doing a combination of “product promotion/product development/R&D”. My job title for the moment is “product manager”, because that’s the closest fit to what I’ll be doing, but the position is really a lot more open and cool than that. Basically, I’m going to work with Dylan, Alex and the others at SitePen to build neat products and scalable services.

With its ties to Dojo, SitePen is obviously a very open source friendly environment, and they’re very committed to the open web. I think there’s a terrific opportunity to build new products and services within this environment.

So, what will these new products and services be? Great question. I’ll let you know once I figure that out

Greetings to my new colleagues at SitePen, and a “fare thee well” to my friends at Arbor Networks.

As I’ve announced in a separate posting, I’m going to go work for SitePen. I wanted to say a few things about Arbor Networks, the company that I’m now leaving.

There are many plusses to working at Arbor Networks. There are a lot of smart people at Arbor, and Arbor does a good job of ensuring that the new folks coming in are also people you’d want to work with. Pretty early on in one’s career, you learn just how important it is to have good people to work with, and Arbor has lots of them.

Arbor’s engineering staff is almost all located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which remains my favorite place to live. I’ve traveled to many places and Ann Arbor suits my tastes well (YMMV). There are more than 60 people in the Ann Arbor office now.

Arbor has clearly reached a scale where it’s no longer a “startup”. It’s a private company, so I won’t mention financials. I’ll just say that the company is very solid and well-run.

Many people leave companies because they’re disgruntled about the work environment or company politics or some such. I’m leaving Arbor because doing so is the best move for my career.

If you’re into computer networking or security, I’d highly recommend checking Arbor’s job postings out. It’s a growing company with a lot of good things going.

• about:cmlenz – CouchDB “Joins”
  Chris Lenz provides a quick look at how you solve a common problem that is well-understood in RDBMS but not so well understood in CouchDB (blog posting with associated comments)
  (tags: couchdb)

• 09:00 TGWebServices has a new home (code.google.com/p/tgws) and Florent Aide is a new committer there. #

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