As Twttr (sic) celebrates its 4th birthday, I figure it’s as good of time as any to blog about something I’ve been thinking for a while. No, don’t worry, I’m not going to quit tweeting, but I will quit competing. Which sadly, is probably what they want.

The more I play around with Node.js, the more I love server-side JavaScript. Once you get over the weirdness of writing JavaScript outside of the browser, it feels very natural. And the bonus is that it is blazing fast.

Ajaxian had a story yesterday about a brand-new JavaScript playground called jsFiddle. A write and execute web-based JavaScript IDE is nothing new, but this is much, much more than that.

I just finished watching Part 1 of Douglas Crockford’s ongoing lecture series on JavaScript, and it’s fascinating stuff. A must watch for any programmer. Even if you don’t code in JS, it’s worth watching simply because this first part is all about the history of programming. (video of talk is below)

It’s now been about 6 weeks since Apple bought Lala and I’ve spent some time reflecting on the acquisition. When I first heard the news, it sounded like a good fit. After-all, Lala is essentially a web-based version iTunes and has some great technology powering it. It makes sense that Apple would want to buy the next best thing and get some great engineers in the process. However, I didn’t think at the time that Apple’s strategy would become so clear, so soon. Apple’s acquisitions usually take years to come to fruition. Not this time though. TechCrunch recently reported that Apple is planning on transforming iTunes into a cloud-based iTunes.com service, and Lala’s technology is the quickest way to do that. (“Apple’s Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical“).

Loic Lemuer (CEO of Seesmic) recently announced at Microsoft’s Developer Conference that he’ll be releasing a new version of Seesmic that supports plugins. This is huge for developers, as well as users.

It’s my last day at Catholic Content. It’s been a great 3 year ride and is certainly going out with a bang. When we started planning for NCYC 2009 (National Catholic Youth Conference) 18 months ago, I never would have guessed it would be my last weekend. But here I am, working behind the scenes with the production crew to stream the event out to thousands of people around the world. The fun part? I’ve never done live event streaming before, so it’s been a hectic, but adventurous weekend. In a way, it’s almost a culmination of the last three years. Lots of stuff I’ve never done before, but having a blast learning.

When I attended Yahoo’s HackDay ‘08 at their Sunnyvale headquarters, I was so impressed with the people, the event, the technology, and the culture at Yahoo, that I made working for Yahoo one of my career goals. Well, it came a little sooner than I expected, and I’m thrilled to say that starting Nov 23rd, 2009, I can scratch “A career with Yahoo” off my bucket list.