Month: July 2003

Going home, Chicago again and Independence Day

So having not updated my old weblog in ages, here’s what I’ve been up to recently.

Going back to London for my birthday was great – after a few weeks in a foreign land its good to see friends again. I now definitely consider London my home, which is surprising since I really didn’t enjoy it that much when I moved there.

Two weeks after getting back from London I was off to Chicago for the weekend again for a ThoughtWorks internal conference. I had a fantastic time meeting up with loads of people from work (some of whom I had met before) and enjoying the Chicago nightlife again. I’ve been to Chicago 3 times now and everytime I go I have a fab time – it reminds me a lot of London both in size/buzz and the attitude of the people that live there.

Since then I’ve just been staying around Boston. The Independence Day fireworks in Boston were very impressive and, since the weather has improved drastically in the last month, there was a huge turnout.

My plans for the next couple of months include a visit to New York next weekend, going to New Orleans with work the week after and then I’m taking 2 weeks holiday in August to hopefully travel around the ‘States a bit.

Things on my mind

There’s a few tech things I’m working on at the moment:

– CruiseControl.NET is probably the thing I’m looking at most. We’re still working on a 1.0 release.

– Agile Build Engineering in general is something I want to write some stuff on. I’ve started a Wiki and Mailing List on the subject.

– The application I’m developing to generate this Blog has a bunch more of things I want to add to it.

– Thinking about Enterprise Patterns in .NET (this is something ThoughtWorks has been working with Microsoft on)

– Security still lurks at the fringes of what I’m interested in. I just bought ‘Writing Secure Code’ which is required reading at Microsoft (apparently), so that probably has cross-over with my .NET work