Change, sometimes it just happens.

Well, it's been almost two weeks since my previous employer decided it was time for me to make a career change. Of course there's more to it than that but that's all I'm going to say about that. "It is what it is," and I'm actually pretty excited to see where my career takes me next.

While I'm an independent developer (which sounds much better than unemployed, no?), I have a few things I want to work on. Writing again in this blog is definitely one of them. It's been way too long and I've gotten used to spewing things in Twitter which is very handy but doesn't stay around long enough and isn't long enough to capture my thoughts in time. I have lots of opinions on things and it's good therapy for me to write them down.

The main technical area I continue to be very interested is, of course, Eclipse and the CDT. I've spent a lot of time over the last few months learning and thinking about usability and the importance of design and user experience. Pretending to be a newbie CDT user and walking through normal day-to-day activities shows me a few areas that need to be addressed. And since I'm still a CDT committer, I have the power to fix them.

I continue to be fixated with mobile and the new world that mobile UI and application architectures brings us. There's a reason these devices are flying off the shelves at your local phone and electronic store. They're so easy for the regular consumers to learn and use, and so powerful. It's that kind of user experience I'd like to see brought over to the desktop as well. I continue to follow the progress of Qt 5, which I believe can be a great framework not just for new desktop paradigms, but for mobile as well. It still seems to have a ways to go before it's stable, but I'm going to start experimenting with it as soon as I can get a build that works on my laptop.

The third area is a new one for me that I started chewing on in my spare time over the last few months, and that's web app development. Node.js has caught my eye as it has with numerous other developers. It's asynchronous programming model is very similar to the way we often program in embedded to produce scalable systems that react to events in the real world. While JavaScript is the cool thing in the web world these days, I have wondered whether we could provide similar APIs in a type-safe world, say using Java. People use Java on servers, no? And the convergence of server-side apps and mobile clients and embedded devices is a natural. It's the "Internet of Things".

So stay tuned for more over the upcoming days. As I mentioned, writing is good therapy, whether it be text in a blog or code in the exciting new world of mobile/web.