If you’re in Orlando this week there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. Monday is our monthly Adogo meeting with a very interesting talk on Ajax by Brian LeGros. He’ll be going over some Ajax basics and move onto some “push” Ajax, a topic that’s extremely useful but rarely covered. A majority of ajax sites use polling to know when to retrieve data from the server, but with a push service, such as BlazeDS, you can cut out the polling altogether. It’s something I’ve been wanting to learn about for a while, so I’m looking forward to his talk. If you’re curious about the code, it’s available in the Adogo SVN repo, and a recording of the presentation will be available online shortly after.

Thursday is the monthly Orlando Ruby Users Group meeting, which this month will be taking a break from Ruby in favor of Seaside, a Smalltalk framework. There’s a famous quote (by DHH I believe) referencing Seaside: “I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we’re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.” — Avi being the creator of Seaside. Although I haven’t messed with Seaside this looks like it’ll be an interesting talk. Don’t know if I’ll make it though, due to the BIG EVENT for the week.

Thursday night through Saturday night is IzeaFest, which is looking better and better. Aside from a fast growing list of attendees, there’s some exciting speakers including Merlin Mann from 43 Folders, Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney, John Chow a lots more. The scavenger hunt on Saturday night should make for some fun stories after the fact as well.

One thing on my mind more and more recently was the idea of getting a job in what I do during my part time. While working at Westgate much of my spare time at home I’d been slowly learning Ruby on Rails, and liking the core concepts as well as the Ruby language in general. After running into Peter Wright at BarCampOrlando, the idea seemed even more exciting. So I applied, interviewed and was happy to be added to the IZEA team starting last week! That’s the short story of how I ended up here.

Prior to starting at IZEA, most of my exposure had been through PayPerPost, Techcrunch and Rockstartup which don’t show much in the way of life for a developer, or the group as a whole. It’s a dedicated, passionate bunch across the organization though, and with SocialSpark just launching into beta in April there’s a lot to do. Between their company blog, forums, twitter, videos, social networks like ning, flickr and other sites they’re really taking advantage of the Social Web to get the word out. It’s exciting being a place that’s embracing that on so many fronts, and open to trying things out.

The idea of developing professionally in something new (but that you enjoy doing) might seem a little daunting if it’s you’re not at a high level at it. When it comes to programming though, what matters is problem solving, core programming concepts and most of all passion. While staying up to date with what interests you may not be hard, most would agree it’s incredibly time consuming. If you’re staying up to date in ColdFusion, Ruby, Rails, Java, Air and Flex — chances are you’re not spending much time getting things done! I think that was a gap that I feel into a few months back. Clear out your RSS reader of those feeds you’re not interested in (or that just post too often)! Read the headlines of areas you’re interested in, while reading in depth articles for the things you’re passionate about will probably leave you happier. If you honestly don’t see yourself going forward in an area don’t feel like you have to follow it as aggressively. Trim it down to the cream of the crop and you’ll get all the information you need. I felt a little guilty doing this at first, but it was just too much reading. What matters more is finding your own sweet spot in terms of how much information you want from every interest, and constant re-evaluating it. If your interests change, your news intake should change. Don’t rule out changing jobs — it’s all about finding what you enjoy after all!

Designing the Obvious is a book I ran into at Books a Million a few months ago. Usually when I head out to bookstores I grab a handful of books and end up scanning over them for tips, maybe reading a few relevant chapters, then putting it back. Very rarely do I end up reading through the entire book at one sitting at the bookstore. That’s just what happened with Designing the Obvious. After reading through the entire book I put it back on the shelf as usual. On a second trip to the same bookstore later I ended up reviewing most the book, gleaming new shreds of information from each chapter. Rarely have I spent so much time on a book, better yet seen relevant bits a second time through. Eventually I ordered it from Amazon and have re-read most of it since then. If you want to check out a sample chapter from the book, it’s available for free on the authors website.

The author, Robert Hoekman, Jr., also has a second book coming out just this week called Designing the Moment which seems to pickup with more concrete examples and run with them. Obvious was more general in what you want the user to think and what you want to convey in your app, while Moment seems to be more about analyzing actual examples. Anyone interested in creating kick-ass interfaces that people love to use should consider reading both of these. Moment comes out this week, so it’s a good time to grab one or both if it’s a topic you enjoy. Like Obvious, there’s a sample chapter on the authors website.