Welcome to the New Site

I’ve maintained a blog since sometime in May of 2005. As with many blogs, posting regularity varied. Sometimes it was daily, sometimes a month or two would go by with nothing new at all.

This is something different.

The content on the old site changed over time, just like it’s author. Interests come and go, technologies that were once shiny and new have lost some of their shine. I stopped writing short posts that were mostly links to other people’s content, and starting writing longer articles. I did some interviews, and a bunch of book reviews.

Then, as is prone to happen, I got busy. In the time I’ve been writing this I’ve gone from having one child to having three. My job responsibilities have changed. This site got a bit neglected as a result.

So a while back I started thinking about the site, and what I wanted it to really become. And I thought. And then I thought some more. My thoughts evolved over time, and I’ve settled on what I’m launching here today.

I’m a curious person, and always have been. My interests are varied, and change often.This site is a reflection of those facts. Some of the content from the old site has been migrated to here, much of it was not as it was either not relevant or didn’t fit well with the new site. The focus of this new site will be whatever happens to have my interest at the time: mostly technology, software development, and entrepreneurship, but extending into other areas as well. I will continue to do interviews and book reviews, and have several of both to publish in the very near future.

I hope to write here on a more consistent basis, but they will be longer articles and as such it’s not likely to exceed more than once or twice per week. I’ve created a new section just for links to interesting things, called Curiousities, and there will be content there daily.

In Defense of Twitter

Twitter bashing has become a bit of a past-time for some people. I don’t think that the criticism leveled at Twitter is fair or accurate. It is generally based on a misunderstanding of the technical problems they are facing. In the case of TechCrunch, it’s a desire to drive traffic to the TechCrunch website by fabricating conflict and making personal attacks.

Twitter has had a hard time scaling. This is obvious to anyone that uses the service, and is readily admitted by the people behind Twitter. The present problems have brought out all of the Armchair Architects, and I’ve seen a lot of commentary stating “I don’t understand why this is so hard, all you need to do is [insert gross over-simplification of the problem here]”. It’s very easy to apply some 20/20 hindsight to this problem, but another thing entirely to be in the trenches day after day working to keep Twitter up and running while trying to make large-scale changes to fix the underlying problems.

Here’s the thing. Twitter was started as a side-project inside Odeo. It was developed in Ruby on Rails, the same tool that they had used successfully to build Odeo. While this choice is a major discussion point for their critics, it seems to me to have been a very reasonable decision. Ruby on Rails was what they were familiar with, and at first glance seems to be a good fit. I suspect most people would have made the same decision, given the same situation. The bottom line: They made the best decision they could, based on what they knew at the time. Keep in mind that nobody even knew whether Twitter would gain any traction - certainly none of them could have anticipated the warm reception it has been given.

Obviously their existing architecture isn’t working. The fine folks at Twitter have figured this out, and they are busy rebuilding the system to handle the current load and scale accordingly. This isn’t an overnight fix - it will take time to rebuild Twitter with all-new innards. Let’s be patient. Frankly, the internet needs to take a collective chill pill on this topic.

If you’re not following me on Twitter, you can remedy that here.

Cool OS X Application: Shelf

One of the most useful ideas I’ve seen in the past few years was Dashboard. Dashboard was an open source project launched by Nat Friedman of Ximian (since acquired by Novell). It’s aim was to provide a “dashboard” of information relevant to you while you were doing work. If you were having an IM conversation with your friend Bob, it would show you the last few emails Bob had sent you, previous IM conversations with Bob, Bob’s contact information from your address book, etc.

I had always thought that Dashboard was an intriguing concept, and one of the few examples of real innovation on the desktop that I have seen in a while. It was a bit dissapointing to see the project get sidelined, but these things happen.

A project emerged recently for OS X that is based on the same concepts, although implemented differently. It’s called Shelf and is written by Tom Insam who is a developer at Dopplr (though all indications are that this is an independent project and not supported or endorsed by Dopplr).

Shelf watches the applications you are using in OS X, and displays relevent information from applications local to your computer as well as web sites (like Dopplr, naturally). Here is Tom’s own description from the Shelf website:

Shelf is an app for MacOS that looks at the current foreground application, and tries to figure out if what you’re looking at corresponds to a person in your Address Book. Then it’ll tell you things about them. … Just run it. It’ll sit in the background, and watch the foreground application. If it can tie something you’re looking at (the current url in your web browser, for instance, or the target of an open chat) to a person in your Address Book, it’ll open a window and show you their name and picture, and it’ll try to fetch RSS feeds for any URLs in their address card.

Although it’s a newer project (only at version .13), Shelf seems to be off to a promising start. It provides hooks into a number of different applications on OS X already (according to the Shelf site):

• Safari - looking at the foreground url, and for microformats in the source of the current page.
• Firefox - looking at the foreground url.
• Mail.app - From the email address of the sender of the currently selected email.
• NetNewsWire - From the homepage url of the currently selected feed item.
• Twitterrific - From the homepage or twitter page urls of the currently selected tweet.
• Adium - From the IM username of the current conversation.
• iChat - From the IM username of the current conversation.
• Address Book - The currently selected person.

This is an idea whose time has come, I think. There are obviously some gaps here, for example if you use GMail as your email application (as I do), or Google Reader for RSS feeds. Integrating with all of these applications is a tricky problem, but it’s not insurmountable. I think it’s certainly worth solving though, as the benefits could be huge.

I hope this project doesn’t fall by the wayside, as it has too much of a potential impact on the way we work. It’s possible that Apple will implement something similar, it seems like the next logical progression of Spotlight.

Are there any other tools like this out there?

Links for 5/27/2008

I’ve built up a big backlog of links. Here’s the first batch.

Unix Command Line Kung-Fu

33 Pages of command line goodness. I’ve been rocking the command line for almost a decade, but there’s a ton of stuff here I didn’t know.

Update : Hal Pomeranz, who created this document, sent me an email with a link to the PDF version of the document. You can find it here. Thanks Hal!

Erlang vs. Scala

I want to experiment with both of these languages.

21 Ruby Tips You Should Be Using In Your Own Code

The title is self-descriptive, and as you would expect from Ruby Inside there are a lot of nice shortcuts here.

Community Engine: A Social Networking Plugin for Ruby on Rails

This has been pretty well publicized, but here it is in case you missed it. Community Engine allows you to add social networking capabilities (profiles, photos, blogs, forums, and more) to any application simply by adding this plugin. Extracted from live websites, so it is real-world tested.

Awaken

Awaken is a slick little app for OS X that I picked up as part of the MacHeist bundle. I’ve used it as a timer for those occassions when I need to force myself to work on something for “Just 10 minutes”, but here are some other uses.

Video Lectures

I stumbled across a great site tonight, chock full of the geekiest videos I’ve seen. The main sources seem to be university lectures. Very good stuff, and in a variety of disciplines such as Computer Science, Business, Chemistry, and Mathematics.

Check it out: Video Lectures.

The Two Kinds of Programmers

In my time as a developer, and now managing a team of developers, I have come to realize that there are two kinds of programmers: the Journeyman and the Craftsman. These terms aren’t mine - I’ve seen them used other places - but they describe the developers I’ve worked with pretty well.

The Journeyman

…knows one programming language.

…knows one operating system.

…can’t be bothered to learn something on their own.

…doesn’t know anything about the operating system or hardware their applications run on: “Someone else takes care of that”.

…never masters his tools. “I know my way around my IDE, that’s good enough”

…doesn’t refactor: “It’s ugly, but it works. Leave it alone!”

…only learns about the part of the system they are working on. No need to learn the rest of the system: “That’s not my job”.

…doesn’t want to take on an unfamiliar technology: “I haven’t had any training on x”.

The Craftsman

…knows a handful of programming languages, and is always on the lookout for the next one he should learn. He knows that learning any new language will stretch his mind and make him a better programmer in the language he uses day to day.

…devotes time to learning about new technologies, and helps to make others aware of them.

…understands the platform and operating system his applications run on, because he knows that’s the only way to diagnose many problems.

…masters his tools. He can perform magic in his chosen editor, and is always looking for ways to make himself more efficient.

…rarely passes up an opportunity to broaden his knowledge of the system he is working on.

…is always willing to take on something he’s unfamiliar with. He can pick up most things pretty easily, and enjoys the challenge of learning something new.

One craftsman is worth three or four journeymen. Easily.

It’s the journeymen whose jobs often end up moving overseas (and rightfully so, they add little, if any, value).

The longer I manage development projects, the more I value the craftsmen I have around me.

My Favorite New Site: Tripit

I’d heard (first from Joel Spolsky, I believe) about a cool new travel planning site called Tripit. I’m making arrangements for a trip to St. Louis later this month, and so I thought this would be a good opportunity to try it out. To say the least, I’m impressed.

The first thing that I noticed was the registration process: there isn’t one. All you have to do is take any travel-related email (hotel confirmation, airline itinerary, etc) and forward it to plans@tripit.com. If the email account you sent it from isn’t already registered with Tripit, they create an account for you and send you your registration details. Most sites would have you create an account first, filling out a lengthy form before you could use it. Tripit’s strategy on this is brilliant as it removes all barriers to entry to their service, making it completely painless.

Tripit then takes that email and creates an itinerary. I emailed it a hotel confirmation, and it was able to extract out the hotel name, arrival and departure dates, the city I was staying in and more. It builds a nice itinerary out of this data, and adds some useful information to it like weather and maps.

Tripit also allows you to collaborate, sharing your trip information with others in your party. There’s also a social networking component. If you add contacts who also use Tripit, you can see who else might be close to you on an upcoming trip. I don’t really travel enough to probably get much use out of that, but I can certainly imagine that it will be useful to a lot of people.

One other nice feature is that it can publish your itinerary in iCalendar format, for consumption by Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, or Apple’s ICal. It also appears to have good support for mobile devices, though I haven’t had a chance to try that out. One other nerdy item to note is that they’ve marked up many of their pages with Microformats.

All in all, Tripit is an impressive service so far. I would definitely recommend giving it a try - it’s as easy as it gets.

Links for 4/2

A list of random and assorted things I have found lately

New York Times blog on open source technology at the Times

“A blog about open source technology at The New York Times, written by and primarily for developers. This includes our own projects, our work with open-source technologies at nytimes.com, and other interesting topics in the open source and Web 2.0 worlds.”

There are a lot of nice posts in there, including one on how they used EC2 to convert their archives to PDF.

Desert Rails Plugin

Desert is a component framework for Rails that allows you to seamlessly define in your plugins: \* Models \* Controllers \* Views \* Helpers \* Routes \* Migrations \* Plugin Dependencies

Five Runs Interviews

Five Runs is conducting a series of 5-question interviews. So far they have interviewed Chad Fowler, Michael Cote and Peter Cooper.

Arc is Released

Paul Graham has released Arc, his long-awaited Lisp dialect.

Arc is designed above all for exploratory programming: the kind where you decide what to write by writing it. A good medium for exploratory programming is one that makes programs brief and malleable, so that’s what we’ve aimed for. This is a medium for sketching software.

How to be a Great Dad - 12 Awesome Tips | Zen Habits

’nuff said.

Mac Question: What Books Should I Buy?

I’ve owned the Macbook Pro for a little while now, and am getting comfortable with OS X. I think it’s time to dig a little deeper though, so I’m going to buy a book or two.

I’m a long time computer user, and have a lot of *NIX experience, so I’m not looking for something too basic. I’d like something that will teach me the ins and outs of the whole operating system, and let me go from being “comfortable” to “power user”. I’m leaning towards Mac OS X Leopard: The Missing Manual, but I thought I would ask here if anyone else has any other recommendations.

Is SwitchPipe the Solution for Rails Shared Hosting?

Peter Cooper (who I interviewed recently ) has just announced SwitchPipe, which aims to make deploying and hosting Rails (and other frameworks, such as Django) applications easy. From the site:

Introduction / Overview\ SwitchPipe is a proof of concept "Web application server" developed in Ruby. More accurately, it's a Web application process manager and request dispatcher / proxy. Backend HTTP-speaking applications (Web applications) do not run directly within SwitchPipe, but are loaded into their own processes making SwitchPipe language and framework agnostic.\ SwitchPipe takes control of, and manages, the backend application processes, including loading and proxying to multiple instances of each application in a round-robin style configuration. As an administrator, you can define the maximum number of backend processes to run for each app, along with other settings so that you do not exceeded preferred resource limits. SwitchPipe quickly removes processes that "break" or otherwise outlive their welcome. For example, you can let SwitchPipe kill any backend processes that have not been accessed for, say, 20 seconds. This makes hosting many multiple Rails applications, for example, a quick and non-memory demanding process, ideal for shared hosting environments.\ ...\ SwitchPipe's goal is to be:

* super easy to configure
* the easiest way to deploy multiple HTTP-talking backend applications
* painless in terms of management; no hand-holding of different applications is needed
* a permanent daemon that can handle configuration changes in backend apps “on the fly”
* a reliable solution on Linux and OS/X (and anything POSIX compatible, ideally)