Mark McSpadden

I was doing more normal feed scan on Tuesday, when I came across an article by Robbie Wright titled Making RSS Easy. Little did I know it would steal half of my week.

What Robbie and the world didn’t know is that at my day job I’ve been hacking away at a community site for bankers that is all about making industry specific information easier to find and use. With that in mind I started hacking away trying to aggregate FI feeds. The results are as follows:

• Six compiled FI feeds
• A splash page for Banktastic complete with Google Analytics
• A mailing list for the Banktastic Beta Launch
• A deadline for Banktastic Beta

The moral of the story: Don’t read Robbie’s blog :)

It’s official, Brad and I are on a collision course with the first BarCampBank in the US, BarCampBankSeattle!

I’ve got so much to do to get ready for this thing that it’s stupid, so the post ends here.

There are not enough exclamation marks in the world to follow that title. I’m so happy to finally have this app up and running and waiting for the world to embrace it.

Ok…so it’s really not targeted at the whole world…just the world of Financial Institutions and their Risk Assessments. (But that’s still a good sized world!)

Check out the full announcement at: blog.riskkey.com

I hope to follow this launch with several posts about my experience over the last month in trying to push this thing to launch. Should be some fun JS, RoR, and UI discussion!

It’s been a while…almost a month…so I thought I do a quick update (in chronological order):

• My wife and I bought our plane tickets for our two week excursion to Europe this summer!

• My wife started a personal blog for us! This is great because 1) it gives me a appropriate space to post my “personal” stuff (like the Europe trip thing) and 2) she did it all my herself! I’m a proud nerd!

• I joined The Garland Group as a full-time employee. We do IT audits and risk assessments in the wonderful world of banking. Most of my work will be centered around building software to make this process easier, more efficient, and more collobrative.

• I finally made it to a Dallas.rb meeting (after showing up a whole day early) and a Refresh Dallas meeting. I really enjoyed both and hope to make my attendance more regular.

So there’s the update. And now an announcement. I plan on moving this blog in a more development centered direction as a way to share the experiences I’m having at work and in code. So don’t be surprised to see a lot rails and javascripts posts. You have been warned :)

Just confirmed today that I’ll be at SXSW in Austin! I’ll have more to say about the whole thing later…but I’m pretty stoked about going!

Maybe I’ll see you there….

A Rails job to be exact. That’s right, after 18 months of freelancing and entrepreneurship I have decided to explore the options of full-time employment. I have very much enjoyed this past year and a half, but I also look forward to the new challenges that now lie before me.

I am currently looking for a Ruby on Rails job in the Dallas metroplex, so if you know anyone, feel free to pass my name along.

In conjunction with this search, I’ve set up a resume site at resume.markmcspadden.net. If you’ve ever wondered what I do or if you are just bored at work, go check it out and tell me what you think.

I’m excited about this next step and look forward to sharing it with all of you!

In case you didn’t know, today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. My college roommate Paul and I stumbled upon this holiday sometime during our university years and it is one of our favorites to passively celebrate. We don’t get dressed up or throw a party or anything…we just talk like pirates more than we usually do.

Need more info about Internal Talk Like a Pirate Day? Check out their website at www.talklikeapirate.com.

Need help talking like a pirate…checkout this You Tube video by the pirate guys…

After a very long break, markmcspadden.net is back as my not-so-personal blog! I have been meaning to get on this for some time and after a long week of what seemed like a thousand different projects, it felt like the right time to do a little something nice for me! (Yeah…I’m a nerd…something nice is making a blog!)

(Thanks to typo and the green bean theme for the quick jump start!)

So here it is…a blank canvas…I’m excited to see what we come up with!