Ok, just got back from Railsconf, and I realize how lax I've been on writing about what I've been doing. Grockit completed it's second round of funding as reported on TechCrunch last week, and things are picking up steam at a nice clip. We're actively hiring if anybody is interested send me a resume. We are in a closed beta now and we'll be adding people throughout the summer. Railsconf was fantastic as usual. Parts were better than years past, parts were worse, but overall I still learned a lot and got to hang with a lot of people I respect and enjoy learning from.

I'm still playing with merb, but work on blerb has pretty much died out. Most have switched over to feather which has a bit more traction. It has a very well developed plugin framework (which is about to be converted to merb-slices according to the chatter in #feather). It's blazing fast and easily extensible. I'm still planning on converting this blog over to something else that will tax my slice less, so feather is the current choice du jour.

For those of you who played the legendary unroll game (llor.nu) when rails was still a fledgling platform, the source has been revived and is available on github. As it is now, it runs under Rails v1.2.6. The instructions in the readme are good enough to get you going. Feel free to fork it and get it up and running publicly if you wish. I'm contemplating a port to merb (just as an excuse to get deeper into the merb framework), or possibly a facebook app. Michael Buffington, creator of the original (and currently my boss), got it running again during Railsconf and wanted it released into the wild to see what kind of craziness people could unleash upon it.

I love what I do as a developer. As I’ve grown in my profession, I’ve come to realize that writing good code for the sake of writing good code is not enough for me any more. I have been on too many never-ending projects that outside of the narrow scope of the company had a pretty low POGG score (POGG = my new metric for determining the worthiness of any endeavor: Purpose of Greater Good). There is nothing wrong or inherently evil about those projects, I am just at a point where I want my work to count for something better if I have that as an option.

So with that as a backdrop, I’d like to brag a bit about my current job. Anybody that knows me, and especially those who have been to my house an been pwned by my 5 year old at a game of Jenga knows I’ve always been passionate about gaming, especially good ones that make you think in different ways. I’ve had very animated conversations with many people about the educational power of games and how that’s been so underutilized in mainstream education. As a homeschooling family with five incredible children (and an amazing wife who shoulders the bulk of that immense burden) education itself is also something I take very seriously.

Back in the summer, my contract at Revolution Health was quickly coming to an end and I was concerned with what I would find to do next, the prospects were not that encouraging. Like a cloudburst on a dry parched day, along comes Grockit. I answered a post on the ruby jobs list with some fear and trepidation because the opportunity sounded too perfect. Some while later, on a Tuesday morning I had a phone conversation with Michael Buffington (technical co-founder). Later that day I had a call with Farbood Nivi (CEO and education ninja). It was a perfect match and by Wednesday evening I had an offer in hand and a place to go. (There are some other interesting parts to this story involving haiku, but that can wait)

So that’s my part of the story, but what’s Grockit all about? For the bulk of that answer you’ll have to be patient. We are working very intensely on a platform that will be released at some later date. I can tell you it’s a game platform about education, and it’s all about helping people teach each other. The premise is that you learn better when trying to help others learn as well (not coincidentally, kind of like the title of this blog :) ). I could tell you more, but then I’d have to kill you so let’s just keep things simple for everybody and I’ll keep quiet. It would be better for you to get the vision from the our “Chief Teachnology Officer” himself (no that’s not a misspelling). He recently did an interview with Brian Norgard that’s worth a look. It shows his passion and drive to pull this off. Check it out and stay tuned. I’ll post updates as the important dates are nailed down.