I’m hoping to begin a redesign of my personal web site starting over the July 4th holiday. I want to find a new blogging engine instead of WordPress - probably something based on Rails. I plan to refocus the blog on more long form technical posts and leave the rest to Twitter.

The Getty milestone represents the longest I’ve stuck with a company since I left Microsoft. To be honest, I wasn’t very happy with my vagabond professional existence. But in each case, I felt it was the right thing to move on. I’m glad that I’ve been able to stay put and become integrated into a company for a longer term. I’m working on an important project for the company (Flickr). The work is certainly challenging and feels important. I spend my days with my favorite development platform Ruby on Rails and work with Mac OS X and Linux.

I do miss the startup world at times. For the most part, my team feels a bit like a small startup. There are times when structure and bureaucracy get in the way. But given the way the world is right now, it’s good to be in a company that has cash and revenue. I hope one day to go for the startup idea again but next time, I’d want to be in the center of it. For now, Getty is a good place for me.

The other related anniversary is that I’ve been working with my personal trainer Rose for a year. When I joined Getty, I wanted to find a gym so I could exercise at lunch. Fortunately, a great gym Sound Mind and Body is literally across the street. I signed up there right after I started. SMB offered a free trainer assessment when you sign up. I felt like I wanted to lose about 10 pounds so I took the assessment.

After meeting Rose, I decided to work with her for two months. We started with just pure weight loss and she set reasonable goals — losing the 10 pounds and cutting body fat to 20%. I started this process at 205 lbs, 24% body fat, and a size 36 waist.

Well, it just took off from there. Rose is amazing. I had no idea how much help a trainer can give you. I have always been active and worked out. However, I wasn’t concentrating on the right things nor was I spending the effort in the right place. With her guidance, we greatly intensified my workouts. She also helped me completely reconstruct my diet.

Within three months, I had dropped 25 pounds and was around 16% body fat. By six months, I was down nearly 40 lbs and at 14% body fat. I’m now around 155 lbs and close to 12% body fat with a waist size of 30. I become a serious cyclist including doing my first century (with another 50 miles the next day for good measure). I started bicycle commuting 30 miles each way. This summer, I was routinely doing around 200 miles a week. We’ve continued to work together and I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been in.

In many ways, I feel like I’m a very different person today than I was a year ago. Professionally, physically, and mentally, I’m definitely in a much different place.

We all struggle with decisions every day. There are many times when you clearly see that you can make a decision to change direction or continue where you are going. Most times, we choose to just continue. And many times this is the right choice. But sometimes, it does pay to tell yourself you will change. If you aren’t happy or it feels like things are not going the way you want them to, you must change. I’ve felt bad, disappointed, even embarrassed that I couldn’t pick a job and stick with it. But in the end, it was right for me to do it. I am better at what I do because I walked away from those other jobs. And I think those other jobs are probably better for me leaving.

And without a doubt, changing my body is dramatically better. I only wish I had done this 10 years ago.

I went to two sessions. First was on refactoring. I think I’m pretty good at this already but I did pick up a few tips. They used an agile project management tool called strac. I didn’t agree with all the tips but I did get better clarification on when/how to do mixins cleanly.

The second session was a pretty big disappointment. I went to a talk on testing for developers. It just wasn’t well done at all. The presenter assumed we knew RSpec and he rarely explained what exactly he was doing. I readily admit that my Rails testing practices need improvement. I was hoping to get a little more hand holding on the right way to do it. This session didn’t deliver.

Tomorrow the main content gets underway. I’m looking forward to the talks. It feels like OSCON but the focus on Rails topics will be fun. And I’m bringing my laptop tomorrow. I tried the lightweight approach today but too many times I wanted to try something out or looks something up. They should rent out those Nokia handhelds for conferences. iPhone isn’t enough and a laptop is sometimes too much.

All kidding aside, this is a very long overdue change and in my opinion makes Gmail legitimately useful. I’m glad there is a web interface but it is not as good as Mail.app or Thunderbird. And IMAP makes Gmail much more useful on the iPhone. Cool.