After a spring filled with varying degrees of turmoil, summer is finally here. And with that, my friends, comes my break from development, blogging and any other computer-related activity.

The next three months, June, July and August, I’m going to spend full-time with my wonderful daughters Emilia (turning 4 in August) and Filippa (a year and a half old). Except for having the fantastic opportunity to take the time to do such a thing, it is also great for me personally to get some balance and perspective about what’s important in life.

Circumstances

People passing away

Within the first three months this year, two persons I really liked passed away, and with that at the back of my mind, I can see no better way to spend my life than with my loved ones, cherishing life as much as I can.

Work

I don’t want to go into details, but certain things at work has made me lose the lust for the moment, hence a break is so very well needed. My hope is that I’ll come back more motivated this fall, and that some factors have changed a little. Only time can tell.

Blogging

To be honest, I’ve been quite pleased with my blogging these last months. Bringing up interesting topics and good discussions, and it just goes to tell how important blogging is to me. Please go through the Archives of all posts to find out more.

While I’m happy with almost everyone of them, I’d personally say that, for now, my favorite blog posts and code releases this year are:

• dLite – a lightweight JavaScript library for those who want less features, and more control
• Thoughts on developing with the Adobe AIR framework
• The ultimate getElementsByClassName, anno 2008
• How to hide and show initial content, depending on whether JavaScript support is available
• Improve your web site performance – tips & tricks to get a good YSlow rating
• Event delegation with JavaScript
• Interface Developers have to be available from start to end in a project (and work with real live code)
• A CSS class hero
• What’s your level of code assertions?

Jaded and tired

As most of you know, I’ve put a lot of work into DOMAssistant. I’ll be completely honest and say that that has left me with three general feelings:

• I’m quite happy with he results we have accomplished!
• I’m very grateful to have gotten to know such talented and dedicated developers.
• I am bitter (true honesty now, right?) that if someone like John Resig would have released it, it would’ve had about 500 000 downloads by now (and no hard feelings about John, he’s a true genius and a nice bloke; what I mean here is rather getting the exposure, PR etc).

I’ve made a couple of comments because of that last bullet, which I don’t really like, since I’m normally all about people’s free will and being friends with everyone, so turning into a jealous developer is not something I’m proud of. Don’t worry. that’s gone now, for sure.

My blogging and constructive coding as of lately, though, especially releasing dLite, made me get my passion back in regards to developing because it’s FUN! 🙂

Being at home

Writing this, I have actually had two weeks at home with the kids already. I’ve kept on blogging and releasing things, since there were a number of ideas and code I wanted to get off my chest before my leave; and since I refuse to use the computer when anyone else in the family is awake, it has been quite a few long nights as of lately. I am currently the poster boy for sleep deprivation… 🙂

During these two last weeks I’ve learned that, when being out on excursions with the daughters, as soon as we say hi to a complete stranger, wave to someone driving by or something similar, the conversation with Emilia (the oldest) almost always goes like this:

– Dad, what’s his name?
– I’m sorry honey, I have no idea.
– I’ll ask mom; she knows.

If mom indeed does know the name of every man stranger where we live, I think mom and I need to have a little talk… 😉

Learning to say your own name

Filippa’s vocabulary has just exploded, and one of the things she’s struggling hard to learn is saying her own name. For some time it was just “‘pa”, but now it has evolved into “pippa”. Cute, but the problem is that “pippa” is the Swedish slang for “shag”, so it’s a bit interesting when she walks up to people, points to herself and says: “PIPPA”…

Man, I sure hope that behavior wears off before she becomes a teenager…

Spending time with Fredrika

Fredrika is working full time now, but I do hope that we also get to spend some time together this summer:

Yes, Fredrika’s an amazon, and I’m a monkey. Really.

Till September

Since I won’t be publishing any more blog posts during the summer, if you want to reach me, I’ll be reading blog comments and e-mail for a couple more days, but after that, consider me unreachable till September. To be sure when I’m back again, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

Also, let me appreciate my gratitude to you for reading. You mean a lot to me, really!

Read through the Archives if you like my writing style and topics, and also, if you’re interested, please try out some of my latest code:

• dLite
• DOMAssistant
• facedesk
• GMDesk
• Memory

Have a great summer!

Ok, time to stop rambling, and move on to a computer-free living! Have a great summer!