I've been a bit quiet lately, but that's mostly because I've been pretty busy lately. After my old company began closing down, I started going whole-hog in my consulting company, I Know Some Guys. Naturally, I can't go TOO much into it, but the general gist is "so far, so good." We have a couple clients so far and they've been keeping me busy indeed. A lot of that has involved classic Notes client and web development, but I guess that serves me right for snickering at people working on large "modernization" projects. Nonetheless, if you're looking for someone to build an app for you, consult, or so forth, drop me a line.

One nice side effect of having so many tasks flying around early is that it's really giving the project-tracking database I built a trial by fire. I built it to be pretty similar to the one I made at my old place, but boiled down to just the necessary components. Putting it under heavy use has done a fantastic job figuring out which parts I don't really use, which parts I sorely need to add, and which UI decisions I made turned out to be... questionable. Moreover, we're using Freshbooks for our time tracking and billing, and I'm really itching to integrate with their API. I hear tell that Domino has some REST- and OAuth-consuming capabilities and this will finally give me a chance to put them to use in a real situation.

Now, with any luck, I'll have some time shortly to knock out a few posts I've been developing notes on. In the mean time, if you somehow haven't already, go read Tim Tripcony's post about SSJS and the ensuing comment discussion. I promise it's worth your time.

I've made a couple structural changes to the blog here. Normally, I wouldn't make a fuss over things like that, but they're pertinent to the overall theme.

First off, I changed the links over on the right, adding a link to the in-progress home page of my side-project company, I Know Some Guys. We're in the market for contracts - web site projects, internal apps, and the like. I may have more about that later.

I also promoted the link to my portfolio page to its own category. Since the aforementioned side-project company isn't a full-time gig, it can't hurt to keep that and the resume visible.

Finally, the blog itself is hopping on the ever-popular Bootstrap bandwagon. For the most part, the look of the site should be the same, though some widgets here and there are an awkward mix of the two. Many of my projects lately have been Bootstrap-based, and I figured I may as well move this over too, but not just leave it at the default style. Not only is the site (somewhat) more responsive now, but it and the portfolio have been giving me practice with building controls and Themes to make the application of Bootstrap to XPages apps easier. One huge advantage of OneUI is that IBM did a lot of work theming standard controls and building excellent new ones in the Extension Library to automatically gain OneUI styling as appropriate. Fortunately, I can piggyback on that: with a bit of work with Themes and Renderers, my goal is to make it so that an app can be almost-seamlessly switched between OneUI and Bootstrap as desired. They're not perfect matches for each other (OneUI has more structural geegaws), but they're close. That'll give me some much-needed Renderer practice, too.