The details for this year’s EECI were posted just yesterday and I can’t even begin to explain how excited I am to be speaking. Well, excited and terrified as there are a ton of really great speakers and, if last year in Brooklyn was any indication, one of the sharpest groups of attendees I’ve met at any conference.

For my part, I’ll be speaking about writing custom plugins for your projects. Everything from how to get started and the basics of plugin authoring to more advanced features and how to leverage some of ExpressionEngine’s CodeIgniter backbone to accomplish even more custom work without overburdening your templates with inline PHP.

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action.

I’ve recently gotten more into custom EE Add-On development and have found Pkg.io to be an invaluable resource. You can package up templates for every type of add-on imaginable, and it pretty much does all the work for you short of, you know, actually writing the add-on.

By allowing for a more flexible work schedule, you create an atmosphere where employees can be excited about their work. Ultimately it should lead to more hours of work, with those hours being even more productive. Working weekends blur into working nights into working weekdays, since none of the work feels like work.

A great post from Zach Holman on operating hours at GitHub. For me, I know that even though I’m in the office at 8:30 or 9 in the morning, on most days I don’t actually start being truly productive until after lunch.

AnandTech just posted a review of Apple’s new Thunderbolt display. All in all it sounds like a great deal for Apple laptop owners. But then there’s this:

That’s right, the only way to get video to the Thunderbolt Display is by using a Thunderbolt enabled Mac (or theoretically a Thunderbolt enabled PC). For Mac users that means only 2011 MacBook Pro, Air, iMac or Mac mini models will work with the Thunderbolt Display.

Which means that if I were to buy a Mac Pro from the apple store right now, I’d have to go somewhere else to buy a display. That’s the most un-Apple-like thing I’ve seen Apple do in a long time.