Swarmcast launched earlier this week. I suppose I've got some tangential job pride, even if I'm not directly related to the project. Swarmcast being released is good. I like to see the company do good by the community, and after all, it means my stock options are all that more likely to be worth something. And it forces us to respond to the real world demands of users, which we really need, and hopefully, will benefit from.

With the exception of the language structure and other related bits, most of the really snazzy features in Self are in Squeak these days (like Morphic). And Self on Mac OS is noticably unoptimized.

I want to do more with our software, but I keep getting penned in. I joined Research so that wouldn't happen. Obvious lesson: there is no such thing as research in startups. Not pure basic research anyway. Although, I'm not sure why I expected it -- the last startup I worked for was the same (and worse in other ways). Perhaps I thought it was a fluke and I ought to give it a second try. Fair enough.

I do, however, really treasure my work environment. It's amazingly flexable and I'm provided with ample resources. No complaints there. The work just isn't very interesting to me at the moment, although it's a field I have experience in. I think I was looking to diversify more and haven't yet been able to. On the other hand, if I do my bit to make the company successful, then I could presumably do cool stuff later when we have a stable base to develop on. I'm too impatient a lot of the time.

Still playing with Ruby. Still hacking Common Lisp. Still fiddling with lots of other toys. demoncrat is right: I need to release source code.