Reprocessed

I’m back in New York this week, and I went to see Spring Awakening at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre. I’m a huge fan of Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s collaboration Phantom Moon, so I thought I’d see the show if I got the chance.

In short, it was fantastic - the cast, staging, and music worked brilliantly together. I highly recommend you go and see it if you get the chance (it won about a billion Tonys too).

The only complaint I had was that I felt the homosexual awakening of two of the characters was played more for laughs than tenderness - camp rather than dangerous boundary crossing (in 1890s germany…) A lot of that seemed to come from the audience, who laughed at the kinds of teenage awkardnesses that were received as poignant when it was the (straight) leads discovering each other.

That said, it brought real depth to its exploration of all the other issues it dealt with, and its frankness, and wit, was really refreshing. You really should go and see it.

So, I’m going to be in New York from later on today, for a week working with a client on an exciting project. If anyone wants to talk software design, process, and practice, or about comics or whatever then cool. You can reach me by emailing matt at this domain. I’m meeting some of the NYC.rb folks at some point for beers, and I’m looking forward to finally making it to New York.

I’m heading to Berlin for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo next week. I’ll be speaking on a panel with Leisa Reichelt and Fred Oliveira: Moving from 1.0 to 2.0: Philosophies and Structures for Change. We’re on at 9.00am on Tuesday 6 November. I’ll be around for the whole 3 days of the main conference, and I’ll be checking out the parallel web2open as well. I’m looking forward to it!

I’ve been at the BBC for a little over three years, and I’m having a very good time. I’ve learned a phenomenal amount, worked with a slew of really great people, and now I help lead an excellent project team.

But, there’s this thing I’ve been attempting to build in my spare time that I haven’t been able to, because my spare time isn’t nearly as spare as they needed.

So, I’m leaving my job at the BBC to pursue it. I finish in mid-August, after which I’ll be working half-time on the project. The other half, I hope, will be spent gainfully employed with freelance work. (Perhaps for you, dear reader.)

And I’m looking forward to building, announcing, and releasing the project like you wouldn’t believe. Seriously. This is going to be so much fun.

We have vacancies for developers at BBC Audio & Music Interactive at the moment. If you want to join a team building the data-driven future of the BBC’s National Radio and Music presence in the interactive world (the Web, Mobile, DAB data services, Digital TV interactive services) then now’s your chance.

We’re looking for good developers who know their onions when it comes to Web Application development (we use internal Ruby on Rails and external Perl, with smatterings of Python for good measure). There’s a lot to do, and the work is challenging to say the least.

Here are the details:

Software Engineer (Grade 7D), job reference 76321 on http://www.bbc.co.uk/jobs. The closing date is May 28

N.B. There’s an error in the job description. The posts are being are fixed-term contracts (running to the end of the financial year) and not casual contracts.