This article started out as a mental experiment and led to a surprising result. I post this mostly for the fun of it. But of course you can take something away from it. With that I do mean not only technical solutions. I believe firmly that a certain level of playfulness actually helps finding better solutions. The other ingredient you need is a certain eagerness for improvement which means to not be be content too early. OK, let’s start.

Where’s Waldo is my little node.js/Redis project to keep track of users in an app. Say hi!

Tracking hits on every request can get costly, and I didn’t want to hold up the more important server processes with this. So, it felt like a good fit for a quick asynchronous web server. Node.js and Redis fit the bill perfectly.

I was recently invited to talk about my Twitter Node project at last night’s PDX Javascript Admirers meeting. I was really nervous about giving my first talk in several years, but I did alright. My slides are up on Heroku.

The big win of the talk, however, was Scott’s showoff app for composing presentations.

Sebastopol, CA, February 18, 2010 - This year’s RailsConf, offers the Rails community the opportunity to delve into the possibilities created by the Rails 3 release. O’Reilly Media and Ruby Central, Inc. have opened registration for RailsConf on June 7-10, 2010, at the Baltimore Convention Center in Baltimore, MD. To ensure that the program includes the most timely content possible, the call for participation remains open until March 17, 2010.