The "interesting economic times" and breaking my leg in February have combined to put me into a reflective frame of mind about careers.

Many of the talks from EuroPython were recorded as either audio or video; My keynote was captured as video.

The impact of the Google Chrome OS, told through (probably excessive) metaphor.

People who've made the switch to dynamic languages seem much, much happier. I was a bit out of sorts from jet lag and travel in general when I entered the Birmingham UK conference and suddenly a wash of good feelings poured over me. "Ahh! Python Programmers!"

I showed up at the organizational meeting for the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee because Bjarne Stroustrup asked me to. I knew him from my early C++ work and from conferences, and I suspect he considered me a friendly influence.

I regularly receive requests for career advice, and I've tried to capture the answers in this blog, and in a follow-on. For those of you who asked but never got an answer, I apologize. Your questions stimulated me to work on this, and it's taken awhile.

Both social networking and votable newsfeeds are one-dimensional. Combine the two and you get a kind of Pandora for stories, and for discovering people who like the kind of stories you do.

An interview with InfoQ; also includes what I've been up to: writing, theater, conferences, management issues, painting, "First Steps in Flex," opinions on web development, and "Thinking in Java."

A science-fiction study for an upcoming writing group meeting. However, I honestly believe this could happen, and happen in a way similar to what I describe here.

I finally figured out the right analogy for software development. Alas, the target audience for this analogy won't be happy with it.

The Internet accelerates everything. We now watch companies go from "the next great thing" to "meh" in the space of a few short years.

Retrospectives allow you to analyze what worked and what didn't about a project so you can do better in the future. How often, though, do people have either the resources or the wherewithall to do a retrospective on a complete disaster -- arguably where we'll learn the most?

Some notes of my own, and some collected from other attendees.

I have yet to toot my first tweet. Most of social networking has been lost on me. Too much noise, not enough signal.

In a recent discussion, there were assertions that C++ was a poorly-designed language. I was on the C++ Standards Committee for 8 years, and saw the decisions take place. I think it's helpful to understand the language choices for both C++ and Java in order to see the bigger perspective.