Tim Gourley

Designing with web standards in mind is an important aspect of life for the web developer. Currently developers still have to make a hack or two to get a pixel-perfect design to look the same across the major browsers, but it is getting better thanks to the efforts of the W3C, companies such as Mozilla and Apple, and the work of open source developers around the world.

The web is becoming a wonderful place to develop. Dynamic languages, frameworks facilitating rapid application development, and social networking are big trends that interest me and many other developers working with the web today. It is remarkable the kind of application that can be developed with a framework like Ruby on Rails in a fraction of the time it would take to create an application in other frameworks such as Struts.

Tools such as Ruby on Rails, the Grails framework, and JBoss Seam are making life easier for developers who want to work more with with defining a truly manageable domain and rock-solid applications with agile practices in mind. Such practices are being proven over and over again to be results-driven and as such I am a big fan of employing them in my work.

Social Convergence

A big theme in my life right now is social convergence. The social web applications we utilize today all share a similar "social domain" consisting of an identity, friends, and assets. Our goal should be to create a secure and easy method to interrelate the social domain with any and all willing social networks to really foster the idea of being social online. I talk a lot more about these ideas in my blog and on twitter.