Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Higher Education Web Symposium here at Penn. Billed as "The first and only web design conference for IT Professionals working in Higher Education" the conference actually had a lot of great content for web developers working in any discipline.

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I use a good deal of open source software in my day to day development and maybe I'm just lucky, but I tend to find bugs in a lot of that software. I'm also the kind of developer that loves to dig into unfamiliar code and figure out what is going on. This usually leads to me tracking down the issue and submitting a patch back to the project. In just the past couple of weeks I've submitted, and had accepted, patches to both the Apache POI project as well as the Firebug project. Now, I'm far from an expert Java or Mozilla developer, but to fix a lot of bugs you don't necessarily have to know the technology in question backwards and forwards. Far more important is the fact that you have found the bug in the first place and have the ability to reproduce it consistently. Once you have done that you can usually track down the one or two lines causing the issue and figure out a solution. This type of bug fixing has lead to my becoming a core committer on a couple of high profile CF open source projects. Having said that, becoming a committer isn't all that common, and you shouldn't necessarily assume your patches will be accepted by the project. I've definitely had more patches ignored or outright rejected than I've had accepted and included in projects.

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Blogging has been light lately as I've been busy getting settled into a new job. I'm happy to say that last week I started as a Senior Programmer/Analyst the the Alfred West Jr. Learning Lab at the Wharton School here in Philadelphia. After several years of working on some pretty large enterprise ColdFusion applications this move brings me back to what I was doing about six years ago: developing online educational applications in ColdFusion and Flash. I'm very excited about the move as it will give me the opportunity to work with a great group of developers on some very interesting applications. I'm also excited because many of the applications that the Learning Lab develops are simulations and "serious games" which should be a big change from the e-commerce/content management/CRM type applications I've been working on lately. I've definitely looking forward to learning a lot in the coming months, including Flex, and I hope to share some of it here, so stay tuned...

This weekend ColdFire hit a milestone by breaking into the Top 3 Projects on RIAForge.

ColdFire is now only about 10,000 downloads behind the top project on RIAForge, something called BlogCFC by some guy named Raymond Camden. :)

Anyone who has studied OO programming has probably knows that the idea of design patterns originated in the field of architecture. In fact there are quite a few practices and paradigms the software and construction industries share. I've seen a few examples of this recently in the building of 20 new rowhomes next door to mine.

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My wife has to travel to Australia next month for business so we though it would be a good idea for my daughter and I to tag along. Knowing I have a few Australian readers (and more who have visited I'm sure) I thought I'd ask for suggestions of kid friendly things to do in both Sydney and Melbourne. We will be in Sydney for three full days, staying in The Rocks, and Melbourne for two full days. We are looking for things to do, places to eat, etc. all with a 1 year old. And we still need to find a hotel in Melbourne, so any suggestions of places to stay would be much appreciated.

I just read a pretty interesting post via Slashdot: A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality. A great read for anyone involved in hiring developers.

A while ago I posted about a couple of Java libraries for working with Powerpoint presentations. Looks like Google has acquired one of the companies I mentioned, Tonic Systems, and will be adding presentations to their Docs & Spreadsheets offerings. I think Google has done a great job with their Docs & Spreadsheets. Given the power of the Tonic software I have no doubt Google will come up with another awesome application.

I've decided to join Andy Jarrett and participate in CSS Naked Day. I feel kind of naughty getting naked at work, but it only took about two minutes using the function Rahul Narula posted on Andy's blog.

Show your support for web standards by showing off your <body>!

I'm sure I probably knew this at some point, but for some reason it was a surprise to me this past week. Apparently disable controls are not submitted with HTML forms. I ran into this in the context of some AJAX work I've been doing. I noticed one of my form fields was not being submitted and I thought it may have had something to do with my AJAX JavaScript, but it turned out to be something much more basic... You (re)learn something new everyday!