[sword-devel] First post (hey everyone, God bless you)

[brian]

Happy New Years!
    The website said to just dive in and say hello, I am happy to be 
starting out in  working with Sword. I just wanted to give a short 
introduction. I live in Guatemala, and I started out with computer game 
programming about 20+ years ago, started professionally with web dev 
about 13 years ago. I went to college in Oregon and it became a big 
trial but the Lord used it to bring me to Him, now I am forever grateful 
(praise Him) and hoping to contribute in some way using any ability for 
his kingdom (whether it be programming or more direct ministry or 
anything He sets me to do).
    With Sword, I wasn't able to gather that much off the website. I am 
interested in knowing more about the status of the sword program,  who I 
should be in touch with and where help could most be used. Looking over 
the help needed section, creating tools to aid in bible translation 
seemed neat and useful (though I would be willing to look into 
anything). I have experience in C/C++/C#/Java and others but  most of my 
programming has been in Ruby/Rails over the past few years. I could work 
with pretty much any language given a bit of time. I just started 
writing (praise God) a gem to integrate the SVN code into Ruby with 
SWIG. You can try it out (alpha++) with 'gem install rsword --pre' or 
view some of the changes at https://github.com/brianlovesjesus/rsword . 
I am working on making it more flexible right now but I wanted to get 
something out there to start working with the lib somehow. I'd be 
interested in contributing in other ways too, maybe making a way to 
crunch data with hadoop (again a learning experience), or helping to 
document the conversations/status of the project, or if you all know of 
other projects. If any of you want to see an outdated website of my work 
on computers you can go to http://www.briancowan.net
   Other than that, please let me know anything about you guys, and 
maybe etiquette about chatting about God on this newsletter. Do you all 
get together from time to time? Are there any prayer circles? I'd like 
to know more about doing ministry over the web, if anyone is involved 
with that. I hope you all have a wonderful year, full of revelation and 
sound doctrine, prudence and wisdom, and above all: Jesus' faith, Love 
and His presence. Thanks to all of you who have worked hard on making 
this a program a useful reality, praise God
   Jesus loves you! God bless
   -brian cowan