While this website has been lying dormant, I have been doing many things that are more actively tracked on twitter. Here are some of the highlights of what I have been up to.

Adobe

Some of you know I now work at Adobe. But I have since June been the Product Manager for the Web Engine team! I had not previously lived a life of a Product Manager, but for every programmer out there who thinks it is a better life, think again! I find it easier to program than to convince humans.

Fripfrap

So Garann and I have a regular podcast/video stream going on. We didn’t speak about it much because we were not sure if we really wanted to do it. But, after recording 3 episodes, I think it is worth your while to spend 20 minutes of your life on :) Check it out!

Book

I have also been up to my gills writing a book on HTML5 Boilerplate. The toughest part of writing a technical book is how often code changes. Nicolas Gallagher has been doing such an excellent job of maintaining HTML5 Boilerplate that it was many times I had to rewrite a lot of chapters based on newer updates. Nevertheless, I still need to write more errata as there are already updates while the book went out to print!

You can purchase the book at Packt or get a Kindle version on Amazon. If you have already got your copy, please let me know if you have any feedback!

The money I earn on this book goes to Against Malaria Foundation which consistantly is lauded for its effective aid programmes.

Talks

I have been giving several talks over the few months in Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, UK and in US. I thought I would round up the major topic areas and link to videos of the talks as they exist:

Designing in the browser

I posit that modern web technologies require designers to use the medium to design for it. Slides for Designing in the Browser

Pushing the cutting edge forward

A talk on what standards are, how they are created and how to effectively contribute to shaping how standards evolve without losing your mind. I gave the same talk @ SF HTML5 Meetup, which has the more up to date content. Slides for Pushing the Cutting Edge Forward

Web Components with your favourite CSS Specs

A talk on how to use the Shadow DOM with some new exciting CSS Specifications along with some important things to note while using these specs in tandem. Slides for Web Components with your favourite CSS Specs

I will be giving a talk on what’s next for CSS at jscamp.asia. There is a good mix of interesting people coming by, so if you are in that region, please do come to the conference!

Dotfiles

I finally found the time to customize my dotfiles! I started with Mathias Bynens’s dotfiles as was recommended on Github and then went over to the others. But finally ended up on Nicolas Gallagher’s dotfiles as they were most well-organized & written. I added an AWS CLI as I upload my screen captures to AWS S3 bucket and some other tiny aliases that I thought was useful.

I hope to spend my vacation writing my own website generator as one is bound to do and get rid of Octopress monolith! I hope you have a great holiday season!