Most excellent! If everything goes according to plan I’ll be attending both MongoDB Austin and the Lone Star Software Symposium conferences this year.

A recent post on the Trello technology stack got me in gear and researching a lot of things I’d had on my “to learn about” list but had been “too busy” to pursue. The “I’m too busy” excuse only works when you really are too busy and can’t find a way to make time. Unfortunately, the excuse allows inertia to build and sometimes that inertia doesn’t just get built but it also gets walls and a moat built around it too! There is so much incredible tech out there right now and I’m determined to stay on top of it.

Here’s my philosophy on new tech: It’s all just tools. But I need to know what tools are at my disposal to be able to make appropriate choices regarding tools and architecture. I can’t imagine  spending weeks or months working around a roadblock on a project only to later realize the roadblock you were facing was already a solved problem. It can happen if you don’t keep up.

Over the weekend I took a quick detour off my ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ research to read MongoDB: The Definitive Guide. It’s a great book and a quick read.  Unfortunately in the process of reading up on MongoDB I ended up with a few more NoSQL implementations I want to read up on: Redis, CouchDB, and Amazon’s SimpleDB and DynamoDB. Before this weekend I didn’t understand NoSQL at all — my only database experience was with SQL/MySQL. Even the name “NoSQL” confused me. Now that I grok it I’m actually aching for an opportunity to use MongoDB! And what I’ve already read on Redis makes it looks so cool that I imagine it won’t be long before I pick up a copy of Redis: The Definitive Guide.

A housekeeping note: I’d been previously kept a WordPress.com blog whose posts I’ll soon be migrating here. They posts are mainly about NSIS work I was doing at the time, but the posts contain valuable information I don’t want to lose.

Now to get back to queues …