Year of Change: 2008

For the first half of this year, for the most part I kept doing what worked out pretty great for my clients and myself. I used my SharePoint and .NET skills to help people get to where they wanted to be. Those projects are listed on the right.

In other work, mounting dissatisfaction with the tools that were available to enterprises and organisations today (notably SharePoint!) let to my decision to start building a better Enterprise software platform. No small task. Consequently, I switched from Windows to Linux and started learning Lisp: I wanted MetaLeap to stay browser-based but go cross-platform. I wanted the most powerful language I could find. I wanted a language so obscure I couldn't possibly require Enterprise clients or end users to write add-ons or their own solutions in it: thus forcing myself to work even harder at creating a platform where programmatic work should not be necessary to build great solutions in the first place. (If you go for .NET or Java there is the danger of just opening up your API and saying: "I know you can't program, but there are too many talented and affordable .NET / Java coders out there who can build what you need. Or just hire our consultants!" Lisp? Not so. Programming should only be necessary for back-end infrastructure protocol handling or foreign bindings---not for metadata, data (access, display, exchange), workflow, transformation, filtering, grouping, aggregation and so forth: that's one of my mantras for MetaLeap.)