So much has happened since I last posted. On a personal level, watching the kids grow up has been more rewarding than I ever imagined. So much so that we’re expecting our third in April. We’re keeping the gender a surprise. Not my idea, but you pick and choose your battles, right?

We’ve also had to deal with tragedy, as Ashley’s father lost a year long battle with ALS. It was tough to go through that, but I hope that will all the additional recognition and donations received through campaigns like the Ice Bucket Challenge, researchers can one day find a cure. Ashley also unexpectedly lost her grandmother.

I’ve had the chance to work on quite a few projects at work over the past year. One of my first assignments was to update documentation on a widely used Blackbaud product called Blackbaud Internet Solutions (BBIS). This is an older Blackbaud CMS that directly integrates with Blackbaud CMS. It shares a lot of the same functionality with Blackbaud NetCommunity (BBNC), which integrates instead with Raiser’s Edge.

There was a decent amount of documentation around a few older integration points in the CMS, but some of the new REST endpoints and JavaScript SDK. As a proof-of-concept, for Blackbaud at least, we used the static site generator Jekyll to produce developer.blackbaud.com/bbis.

Aside from using a new technology to produce the site, it was also relatively unique for Blackbaud by having the entire source code in GitHub, and be setup to accept contributions from external developers. It was so invigorating to set the model for future projects of this nature at Blackbaud.

As a result, we’ve created Blackbaud Stache - a documentation tool to automatically create responsive websites using Blackbaud’s SKY UX from a plethora of sources. Content like HTML, Markdown, .NET code comments, JS code comments, and API endpoints are all supported.

As one of the first consumer of, the then private, SKY UX, I was very fortunate to be asked to join the SKY UX team. Joining the team has been very challenging and rewarding. I’m looking forward to 2016!