Several people asked what is going on with me: no blog posts for almost a month, litlle presence on Gtalk / MSN. It is simpler to answer this way that write same email over and over.

Unfortunately the reason for being quiet is not that I am taking time off and enjoying myself somewhere in Caribbean on a secluded island without internet connection. Those who know me well also know that I would never go somewhere without access to Web for longer period of time than week - and even that would cause serious withdrawal issues. I am in Ottawa or Montreal or somewhere in between - physically or virtually.

Also - I am OK and am doing great as well. Main reason why the blog was quite neglected for last 6 weeks is actually rather lame: work.

We have landed pretty large project with quite ambitious deadline. It is very exciting opportunity in eCommerce space, based on latest and greatest ATG Commerce 2007.1. This project was great opportunity to explore new features and update my ATG skills. If you know the framework, enough said. If you do not know ATG, it is in eCommerce space something like Ferrari or Lamborghini in cars - very powerful with many unique features, rather exclusive and consequently quite expensive. Enterprise Java in its very serious incarnation :-). I have spent lot of time on this project and have gained a lot of interesting insight not only in areas related to coding, but also in deployment, release management, clustering and so on. It absorbed me so completely that I stopped blogging, limited Web surfing, put my Ruby/Cocoa experiments on hold. I am way behind in my podcast listening (all in total, accumulated over 15 episodes only in TWIT network podcasts itself).

So what has changed that I am back ? Did the project end ?

Nope, quite the oposite, we are hitting QA phase which will be followed by Phase 2 enhancements and busiest time is still ahead of us, as we will be live and selling for this Christmas season. And also few more projects are on the horizon.

I simply realized that with the strong upward trend of our business (we had record month in October, November looks also very strong) and very exciting things in our immediate corporate future, I cannot simply put life outside of work and my other "pet projects" on pause and hope I woud get back to it later. Because there will always be much bigger demand on time and deadlines and challenges and delaying can very well be cancelling them.

Rather than postponing the "rest of it", I am actively searching for better ways how to intertwine these two worlds. I will keep you posted about the progress :-)