I’m still working for FamilySearch as the Developer Support guy for all public APIs. This has been a fun and rewarding experience. I get to write documentation and code samples, present at conferences and webinars, and meet with a lot of companies in the genealogy space. I’m really excited about what is coming in the genealogy industry. Lots of advancements are being made. I’ll update more of what I see coming in a later post.

I’m still doing Ruby programming on the side for USFamilyTree.com. I get to do most of this work during my commute to and from Salt Lake City. UTA has free WiFi on their express buses, which makes it possible for me to still stay productive.

Family life has been really good. Our little boy is almost 2 years old now, and he keeps us laughing and having lots of fun. We’re excited to announce that we are in the application process again to adopt another baby. The second time has been a lot faster for us and we’re getting really close to being approved and on the waiting list.

This blog has typically been about web technology and such, and I plan to keep it on that subject. Some projects that I’ve been watching closely include: Merb, CouchDB, and Rubinius. These will likely be the topics of my next posts.

I’d like to continue with my Wordpress/Hostmonster screencasts, but I haven’t been able to find the time or place to make and record new episodes. Hopefully I can find a Saturday to crank out another one soon.

Don’t be overwhelmed by the 99 slides. It moves really fast, and walks you through the history and concept of BDD.

Perhaps my favorite concept from the slide show is “Design is a Process, not a Phase.” As I have embraced Behavior Driven Development, I have seen improved software design come from the process. I believe this is true because writing the specs help create a clean public interface for your objects and classes. By having the tests that verify the behavior of your code, you can easily refactor without the worry of unknowingly breaking desired behavior.

I’m writing this with my phone to practice typing with this little keyboard.

Maybe I’ll start to use twitter for more practice. Does anyone know of a good way to tweet from a blackberry?

is:unread in:inbox

This will filter your messages to just those that are unread and in your inbox. Pretty cool. This help a lot for me because I have a lot of filters on my mail that mark some mailing list emails as ‘read’ and put others under different labels without marking them as read.

“There is one thing I have learned through the years. Users do not do what they should. They do what they can. And if they can upload a 12 MB bmp image, they will. So I expect this to be a normal use case on many sites.”

This statement really supports the need for data validation and good UI design.

FamilySearch has completely changed the way that we will do our family history by creating a collaborative family tree. No longer will you have to beg your family genealogist to share his/her gedcom file with you. The family tree is already loaded with hundreds of millions of records and is ready for you to search out your family history.

FamilySearch has opened up an application programming interface (API) that allows developers to both read and write to this family tree from their own applications. Other powerful tools are available through the API that will help you to normalize place names, dates, and more. Access to a super powerful search tools are placed at the fingertips of developers who wish to create their own killer family history tool.

That is not all. The Record Search application at labs.familysearch.org is an application that is built on the new Record Search API that will be released later this year. Third-party developers will have access to a vast collection of digitized records, many of which have been indexed and categorized.

So, expect to see a lot of really cool third-party applications built around this new FamilySearch API.

My job at FamilySearch is to provide programming support to these third-party software vendors. My position has never existed here before because we are breaking such new ground. This makes my job very challenging and exciting. This job is going to stretch my abilities and provide me with a lot of growing opportunities. I’m very excited to take on this challenge and to help this new program become a big success. My prediction is that this is going to be huge.

For more info on the FamilySearch APIs, check out some of the presentations from the Developer’s Conference (Scroll down to the schedule and you’ll find links to the presentations).

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

You can also turn it on for Windows by adding the following to your Preferences.plist (C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\Preferences.plist ) file:

<key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
<true/>

For more info, check the Apple support documentation.