The astounding Neon Night-Rider and the return of the web

Looking Back at March

Friday, March 28th, 2008

March is generally a good month for me if for no other reason than I start a new age (which hasn’t happened yet) and look back at an old one. But within the entire month, quite a few things have been going on. Rather than a long-winded talk about each, I decided just to summarize the big things:

AIR Interactive
Our team didn’t win (and I don’t remember who at the moment did, but someone from the company did get the “People’s Choice Award” and functioned well as as a team), which has more to do with the overall team effort than actual ability. Of course, I’m not at all disappointed about the results, as now my next efforts will go to my enthusiastically-crafted team for AIR San Antonio (that, thanks to my enthusiasm for my hometown, I was politely told I “better” participate in), and, like the young people we are, are already in the training rooms getting ready for it in October. That, of course, was in the beginning.

Production Handbook
Chapter 2 is still in the works, and sitting here as a draft I need to check later on. It was an idea I came up with when several colleagues wanted to come into the modern age of development. Also, so of my other colleagues/co-workers who are not in development wanted to know some tips, needed references, so I put together this handbook in hopes of standardizing the way people build sites.

Startup Weekend, BarCamp San Antonio
It’s interesting that in my entire upbringing and occasional mini-vacations back home that I knew about very few web firms in San Antonio, but since being in Houston, I’ve pretty much drawn the conclusion who the “heavy hitters” are other than Rackspace. And through Jennifer Navarrete’s site, I’ve come across some other people interested in getting things “poppin’” back home. With that being said, I volunteered to participate in BarCamp San Antonio, in which the actual date (June or September) is still in the works. Additionally, Jennifer hasalso gotten involved with a Startup Weekend in San Antonio May 16-18. Startup Weekend is where people local to the area (and I still consider myself a San Antonian and haven’t considered myself a Houstonian, even two years after being here) spend a weekend developing a new product and a startup organisation.

Miscellaneous Learning
School is about two months away from ending, but most of my learning has just started, and it hasn’t been in the classroom. The experiences this month have led me to invest my entrepreneurial spirit on my hometown not because I don’t like Houston (and I don’t), but instead because of the significant number of people I grew up around who wanted the same career I wanted, but suffered from wanting a career in a city where the industry is underrepresented (and similarly, where the nearest city is almost characteristically viewed through this industry). Also, there’s just no place like home to me.

In addition to that, I’ve started learning a few new languages to start building applications. I won’t use any of those on this site, but you will undoubtedly find them elsewhere.

On that note, I’ll end my reflection here. I am also making a few behind-the-scenes changes on the site (such as fixing this error that occurs on non-Wordpress pages when I try to validate my code) and will probably be adding a few additional sites to my portfolio and implementing the bells and whistles I wanted to implement at launch. So, stay tuned!

Tags: air interactive, air san antonio, barcamp san antonio, startup weekend, web development, yammering
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