~james/developer/blog

Some friends/coworkers and I have a group blog, Ternary Operator. There’s not a lot there. I guess we don’t have many profound things to say. I’m okay with that.

I’ve written a few things over there in the past which are sort of the “final product” of the stuff here. This is my developer’s notebook and Ternary Operator is the finished product of the results of my explorations and mistakes. If that makes any sense. I’ll probably also do a little cross posting because I’m annoying like that.

Anyway. Link-wise, here’s some of the stuff I’ve already written:

• Making SOAP Calls From OS X, The Easy Way — An exploration of using OS X’s WSMethodInvocation API to talk to SOAP servers sitting on the web.
• Sending Up Custom Types As Parameters In A SOAP Request On OS X — An exploration of the hoops one must jump through to use complex types in a SOAP request from OS X.
• Processing Command Arguments In Foundation, The Easy Way — A quick note I wrote when I discovered that one can use NSUserDefaults to process command line arguments in OS X. Since I didn’t know this before, I decided to document it.

And…er…That’s it. Like I said, there’s a distinct lack of profoundness. That shouldn’t be a big problem here, though, because I’m not interested in the profound. I’m interested in jotting things down as I learn them, detailing frustrations when the technology doesn’t work (or when the documentation makes me think the technology should work in a way that doesn’t mimic reality (or the documentation is just absent)). Basically, I expect this blog to just be more fun.

Hi. Welcome to my dev blog.

It seems common and reasonable for the first post on a blog to explain what’s going on, what the point of this is, and what you can expect. This strikes me as a good idea, so here goes.

My name is James and I’m a developer by day. And a developer by night, actually. Like many programmers, I’m very fortunate to have a job which is also my hobby and to get paid for doing something I’m passionate about (and would probably be doing any way).

Unfortunately, while I absolutely love my job, my duties there do not intersect 100% with my actual interests. So I do a lot of programming on the side on evenings and weekends (mostly poking around at new languages and APIs). This is a place for me to talk about what goes on during the evenings and weekends.

Since this is all just for fun, I tend to jump around from project to project and idea to idea (rarely finishing anything). If you’re interested only interested in some of it, you can use the tag cloud over there on the right to provide a basic filter. Also, since most of what I do is bog-standard coding, there’s not going to be a lot of content here. I don’t think “I made a method!” posts would add much to the Internet, so there’s not going to be a lot of content here. RSS is highly recommended (of course, anyone reading a dev blog probably already worships at the alter of twin gods RSS and ATOM. I’m sure I’m preaching to the choir).

A list of my current projects (and future project ideas!) is available.

Content wise, I expect there to be a lot of Objective-C, Cocoa, and Carbon discussion. I converted to being a Mac user a few years ago, but have only recently started attacking it from the dev side. It’s mostly what I work on at home these days. But who knows where things will go?

As for commenting…since this is a new venture, I’ve decided to try a little experiment and use FriendFeed for discussion. You’ll need an FF account (mine, by the way, is willia4), but you probably already do since the people who read dev blogs also tend to be early adopters. If this doesn’t working out, I’ll look at other options.

I don’t know how you found me, but thanks for reading. I’ll try to be interesting when I’m writing and silent when I’m not interesting. And I think this will be fun.