Yan Sklyarenko started his Sitecore blog, which is great.

Yan is the leader of our modules team, overseeing everything concerning Sitecore module development. He's also been working on our installer, among other things, and is a generally nice guy, which is good for me, because my desk is next to his in Sitecore Ukraine office. Welcome!

I’m starting on twitter at http://twitter.com/a_rusakov – I’ll experiment with format and content, but the primary focus is still Sitecore and everything related to it. It will not interfere with this blog, but hopefully supplement it in a useful way.

Twitter is a micro blogging platform, most known for limiting the length of one message (“update” or “tweet”) to 140 symbols, which dictates its own format. However twitter has also grown to a social platform with its unique flavor, supporting public conversations.

If you don’t want to use twitter but would still like to subscribe to (“follow”) my updates, you can use RSS.

Today I’ve made google chrome a default browser on my laptop and work PC. I’ve noticed that I was spending more and more time in chrome for casual browsing, and when someone IMs me a link, waiting for Firefox to load is just a waste of time. Speed and sumplicity  finally won me over firefox addins.

From now on, it’s IE for Sitecore, Firefox for firebug and Chrome for everything else.

I’m attending my first PDC this year, and I’m definitely up for a few drinks – let me know if you’re around. Email’s alexey at this domain.

Not quite sure what to expect from the conference –  looking forward to C# 4.0, User Experience and Silverlight talks.

I’m on vacation in Copenhagen, on 7-10th of September (i.e. next week).

I’ll be checking email from time to time: “alexey at this domain dotcom”.

An amazing story by photographer Phillip Toledano: "Days With My Father".

This is a tech blog, so what I want to say is how the user interface really worked for me.

It's toned down, elegant and beautiful, being a perfect compliment for the story.

I love how text compliments the images, how they look and work together.

There's no slideshow - I love how it makes me flip the pages, adding just a bit of a physical feel but without the corny page-flip animation.

The interface is not perfect by the books. The table of contents and page flipping controls are not discoverable, you need to hover around just a little. But for story this beautiful - I say this works, putting in some effort only makes it better.

It's also interesting to see similarities with the new slide navigation UI the Mozilla is coming up with for the firefox mobile. Is this going to be a new trend?

Actually, I hate picking such a beautiful thing apart and analyzing it, but it comes with the job.

Sitecore 6 is out, phew.

New features? See for yourself: What's new (PDF, 35 pages), Download, Product page.

For me this sums up 10 months on the user interface side of development, and I'm looking forward to seeing people use and abuse, complain and praise what we have done.

September has been a terrific month. Sitecore Ukraine is proud to have it's first intructor, certified for teaching both SCD1 and SCD2 level courses in English, Russian and Ukrainian - congratulations, Sergey!

Peter Johansson has joined Sitecore as a Solution Architect. You know Peter from the SDN forum and all the cool Sitecore things he has made before and after becoming a Sitecore MVP. In a lucky turn of events we've met here in Copenhagen - thanks for the beers, Peter, I owe you some.

And for me it's been a developer's dream - spending the month working with amazing people, discussing new ideas and getting the old ones to be heard. I am now allowed into the holy shrine of Sitecore, the source code repository, and that includes write access. Working on the core product is obviously very exciting.

This is also a chance to explore my new found passion: designing and building user interfaces that do not suck.

It's time to get a break - I'm leaving to wonder around Crimea for the next couple of weeks.

Next we're in Copenhagen for the annual Sitecore get together. We're having so much fun at these, that this time I'm staying for a month - what are the chances that I'll also have to work ? This should be really fun.

To add some value to this otherwise boring post, I'm leaving you with the nicest 404 page I've seen in a while (via Smashing Magazine) :

Tons of great happened to Sitecore while I was keeping quiet. Completely revamped Content Editor looks amazing, and performs too.

In a weird turn of things, I have installed Office 12 after having a chance to try out our new interface.  It looks like I’m writing the post just to enjoy the experience.  Jakob and Lars have lots of screen shots and detailed info on their blogs.

For the developer goodness, Runi has made most of the main Sitecore API classes support remoting, and it is very simple to use – check out his post for a how to.  There is much more to it, like multiple template inheritance, and hopefully it will start getting out soon.

The best part is that is still the same Sitecore underneath - no breaking changes and no need to start anything from scratch.

And what about me? Well, my mission was to cruise the city promoting the new secret Sitecore Office 13 look and feel using our branding weapon:

I am flying back to Ukraine on Sunday morning. It sure has been a very exciting month thanks to everyone around – I truly appreciate that!