When we originally planned our trip down here, there were 2 places at the top of our list. Santiago and Buenos Aires. Santiago won out by a hair, but BsAs was right up there. After copious amounts of harassment from Robin, I finally gave in, and we picked up some cheap tickets to duck over there for the weekend. For Christmas. I’ll comment on the sanity of that in a minute, but here are some general notes from our Christmas weekend in Buenos Aires!
The Andes, flying from Santiago to Buenos Aires
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We’ve been here for over a week now, and it already feels relatively familiar and normal (in a good way), and we’re getting our feet under us. We’ve been lucky enough to spend some time with a string of different folks who we somehow managed to get connected up with (all connections from before we got here), and we’ve done some more tourist things, plus started getting some real work done.
These updates are as much for my memory as for any interest they may (or may not) be to other folks, so I don’t doubt that they will bore a lot of you to tears. This is a big one…
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If you’ve spent some time poking around in the code for either WordPress or bbPress, you may have come across comments that mention “BackPress”. You may have wondered what this BackPress thing was, well, wonder no more.
In the last few days, I’ve put together a quick site to try to help introduce people to the BackPress project. From the site:
BackPress is a PHP library of core functionality for web applications. It grew out of the immensely popular WordPress project, and is also the core of the bbPress and GlotPress sister-projects.
So effectively, BackPress takes all of the best core functionality (on a code level) from WordPress and bbPress, and makes it available to you and your next PHP-based web application/project. By using BackPress in your projects, you are then able to use most of the code you’ve come to rely on while working on WordPress-based projects, such as $wpdb, trailingslashit(), make_clickable(), __(), wp_remote_fopen() and more. The site includes some details on how to use BackPress in your project, and has the beginnings of a collection of documentation covering the main parts of the code library.
I’m personally really excited about this because I think BackPress has huge potential as a library for other folks and other projects. It allows them to benefit from the lessons learned through years (and thousands of “man-hours” worth of development) on the WordPress and bbPress projects. I’m using it as the core of my HTFS project (not released yet), and I know that some other projects are starting to use it as well. As a developer who has spent a lot of time in “WordPress land”, it makes life so much easier to be able to continue using a lot of the design patterns and techniques that I’ve become accustomed to.
Check it out, and please let me know what else we could get on the site, what needs more documentation etc!
Since arriving in Santiago, I’ve been posed with the challenge of finding good locations to work from. I like to work from cafes, which I refer to as “cafeworking”. Whether you’re traveling or just wanting to get out of the house for the day though (assuming you work from home, like I normally do), your selection criteria are probably similar either way. I decided that I’d document some of the things I look for when I’m trying to find a good place to work for the day. Feel free to add your own criteria in the comments.
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While I’m here in Santiago, one of the things I’ll be doing is putting together a presentation for WordCamp Indonesia. I’ll be keynoting, although I’m not 100% sure what I’ll be covering yet; it’s sure to be something interesting 
If you’re anywhere near Indonesia, book your tickets around January 30, 2010 and come and chat about WordPress with a bunch of like-minded folks! Michael Koenig (a fellow Automattician) will be joining me, and spreading the love about IntenseDebate (which is a major sponsor of WordCamp ID).
It’s now the first Sunday after arriving here in Santiago, Chile, so I wanted to do a bit of a round-up of how things have been so far, post some photos and get down my first impressions. I’m lazy, so I’m going to use bullet-form to get down a bunch of random bits and pieces:
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In a few days, I leave to go to Santiago, Chile for 40 days. It’s not a vacation. It’s not a work trip. If anything, it’s an experiment. It’s a test of the concept of truly remote working and of living a more portable (nomadic?) lifestyle. Hopefully, it’s a test of the future.
My apologies in advance, I have a feeling this post is going to ramble a bit…
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