New Interview, New Design, New Book, New Stuff

It's 2:00am and well past time for bed. I wanted to post quickly, though, about a few significant developer.* events that have been in the works for quite some time.

It all starts with this new interview, the third in the "Global Development Series," this time with Craig Murphy of Scotland. My thanks go out to Craig for participating and for the great answers, and to Donna L. Davis for doing the interview.

Publishing this new article is a significant event since it's been such a quiet Fall article-wise. This is only the third article published since August. If you keep reading below about the new web site design and the first developer.* book, you'll know why I've not been able to edit and publish as many articles as I might have liked. (I have lots of new articles in the works, though, including articles from Alistair Cockburn, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, Donna Davis, Edward Nilges, John Bennett, Tim Kitchens, and more.)

When you check out the interview with Craig in Scotland, you will notice the new developer.* web site design. The new design is 98% text-based, improves accessibility, and is all hand-coded HTML (not quite fully validating yet against the strict DTD) and CSS, done from scratch by your truly, with a little help from my friends. Check out the new logos too, designed by Tor Gundersen at Northridge Interactive.

Over time this new design will be rolled out to the rest of the site, and eventually (early next year, hopefully) the blogs/discussion side of the site and the articles/books side of the site will be unified on a single platform with a single design. (I have not had a chance to do a lot of cross-platform testing, so please let me know if you see any isssues.)

You'll also see the new site design on the official page for the first developer.* book, Software Conflict 2.0: The Art and Science of Software Engineering, by Robert L. Glass. The book page has all the details.

I am very proud to be making this announcement. My partner Gayle Devereaux and I, operating under a new company called Read Media, LLC, have been working behind the scenes for many months on this debut title from the new developer.* Books imprint. We are honored to be publishing a Robert Glass book, excited about introducing this book and the author to a new audience, and grateful for the author's confidence in us. We're still hard at work finishing the design and production of the book, which is due out in Spring 2006. Pre-ordering will be available soon.

Finally, I should mention something else new: developer.* stuff you can buy. All the cool people are wearing developer.* t-shirts, hats, and jackets (nice quality, nice prices); drinking coffee from a developer.* coffee mug; driving a car with a developer.* bumper sticker on the back (ouch--$10!); using a computer with a developer.* mouse pad--you get the idea.

Right now mostly what we have is developer.* logo wear, which is nice, but the real reason for getting this t-shirt thing going is that soon we will have a growing number of original t-shirt designs aimed at people just like you--including original art designs commissioned especially for developer.*.

Thanks for reading,
Dan