Resurrection
It's been more than three and a half years since my last blog post here.
The last message was about the birth of our son, now he's already three and a half and going to the kindergarten. A year after his birth I started working part-time, and since a little more than one year I'm self employed. We have moved to our new house. A lot of things have changed.
Now that is absolutly no reason not to blog. All those changes would have been wonderful reasons to do fantastic blog posts! I was just too lazy, to occupied with doing busy work or whatever else crossed my mind.
Well, I've decided to blog again and will try to keep a somewhat regular schedule. I'll try to blog mainly on programming topics, which currently will be mostly concerned with iOS and Ruby on Rails.
The first post is on its way, so stayed tuned.
David Zikai
Three weeks ago today, on January the 9th, at 14:50 CET, our son David 子凯 was born. We are very happy to have him with us and wish him a happy and peaceful life.
Blogging has changed, now that he is here: 
Changes
I haven’t been blogging lately, simply because I have been busy, not so much at work (I’ve been busy there as well), but more in my private live.
Not only are we (my wife and I) building a house (in an unconventional way, more on that in a later post), which takes a lot of time for planing and decision making. We are also expecting our first child to be born this year or at the beginning of next year.
Like falling (and being) in love, expecting a child is testing your point of view on almost everything. There are three questions, which are not new to me, but which I now think about more often:
- What have you done with your life? Where (and doing what) have you spent your time?
- Haven’t you seen what was happening to our planet?
- What have you done to make the world a better place?
My wife an I try to live in a sustainable way. We don’t have a car but rather take the train, we live in a low energy building (and the house we are building right now will be a low energy building as well), we buy food produced within 30 km of our home when possible (bananas tend to be difficult, though) and we by organic food, mostly Bioland and Demeter. Since my wife is Chinese and her family is in China, we try to fly to China once every year (but currently only manage to get there every second year), but we are trying to offset the CO2 we are producing on these flights. The amount of CO2 we are producing lies well below the average german citizen.
But what we do are mostly passive decisions on what we consume and how we travel. Currently we are not actively engaged in making a change. Which brings me back to the questions:
- Haven’t you seen what was happening to our planet? Yes I have, and I have tried our best to live in a sustainable way.
- What have you done with your life? Where (and doing what) have you spent your time? I want to be able to answer something like: I have tried to make the world a better place.
- What have you done to make the world a better place? I’d like to say that I have actually actively engaged in making a change.
But is what I’m doing now, where I’m spending most of my time, satisfying this? I guess I will have go on changing my life.
Back blogging
The last one and a half months I didn’t find time to write articles although I had several topics in my mind because other activities kept me busy:
First, I had been in a customer engagement with a busy schedule. It was JSF project and I was called in late to help out before the imminent release date. Working with JSF again included lots of workarounds, especially yet another workaround to get the GET verb working. I guess I’ll write a bit about that project here in the next days.
Second, vacation! Yes, I managed to have some vacation and even managed to get it in sync with the busy schedule of my wife.
Third, I’ve been talking with several startups lately. The economy is on the rise in Germany and the risk averse tendencies of the last five years are finally starting to ebb away. And Ruby gets some attention as well :-)
Fourth, a busy private schedule with lots of appointments and meetings (which I might talk about later on as well, but probably on an other blog).
But since there a several topics in my queue now, I will be blogging more often in the next weeks.
On the Move...
…that is, on this Move. This is what I spend a great deal of my time on:
The one in the picture is our own Move, but I’m lucky to have one at the office as well. If you have the chance to test one of these chairs, do so. And take more time than just five minutes. This chair really keeps you in motion, even during long coding sessions. And that keeps the stress away from your back. Though it might lock like it should hurt to sit on a Move for more then 15 minutes, my back is relaxed even after ten hours.
Nonetheless, I wouldn’t say that you don’t have to do regular workout, even when you have one of these.
New Theme
Finally I came around to change the theme of this blog. The new theme is an adaption of Justin Palmer’s Azure, I just changed some styles and images.
The header image is a rotated detail of this image:
A spire of the Sagrada Familia.
Things to do in 2007 (Part 1)
- Start a blog – check as done
Well, actually that was one of the things I wanted to do in 2006, but I didn’t take the time to do it, so I thought it would be good to start a blog now, early in the year, and hope that once the blog is there, I will keep on posting…
I will try to write down my thoughts on programming and software development as an art in contrast to engineering. And, if it is an art, I think that software should not only satisfy the needs and requirements of the end-users, but should satisfy certain aesthetic aspects as well.
So I named my blog “Ars Subtilior”. Ars Subtilior is a musical style that was developed in the late 14th century in the Provence. The meaning of it is
a more subtle art
and this is what I’m striving for when I write software and what I want to write about here.
