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You treat her like a sex toy. July 31, 2007

You treat her like a sex toy.

Just pulling her out

when you need a quickie.



She’s not like that you know.

She wants a real relationship

and she’s more than capable

of supporting one.



But that’s all you ever see her for…

A quickie. A little bit-o-feel-good.

You pop her off to get the job done

but turn your nose up at her

when you catch a glimpse

of how kinky she’ll let you get.



You think her “objects” are fake.

But I’ll tell you something:

they are as real as that Java bitch’s

and twenty times more flexible.



You don’t see her for the powerful

woman she is.

You think she’s not good enough

for your “Enterprise”

and then you go and use her again…

squeezing in another quick one

between your “real” apps

when nobody’s looking.



She deserves better than you.

She deserves someone who’ll

appreciate her, who’ll dress her up,

and make her look pretty.

Someone who won’t be ashamed

to take her out in public.



Someone who’s loved her

since the beginning and isn’t

afraid to admin it…

isn’t afraid to sing it from the rooftops!



I LOVE YOU PERL !

And I always will!

My Printable CEO Mods July 29, 2007

A while ago David Seah came out with something he called The Printable CEO.
It, and its later variants, ended up being wildly popular among productivity geeks. I’ve been evolving some variants on David’s designs for for nearly two years now and I’m happy to release them into the wild. I’m calling them
ListfulThinking: The Paper Edition because they combine some of the prioritization aspects of my ListfulThinking software with lots of David’s great ideas. That and it’s all about making lists AND I had the domain already ;). There are sheets for managing your high level weekly tasks, keeping a list of everything you need to do with prioritization indicators, graphing your productivity through the month and a circular monthly calendar which makes it really easy to write notes about upcoming dates.

Bar Camp Manchester == Geeky fun

I am happy to report that I made it to my first
Bar Camp (
Bar
Camp Manchester ) today and thoroughly enjoyed myself. If you’re a geek who
cares about what you do you should definitely go to the one near you. There were
talks on a variety of topics and I was fortunate enough to finally meet
David Seah.



Next time I’ll have to participate in the O’Reilly Make sessions. David came up
with a great chindogu at it. It was a folding stick that could be used to
determine the appropriate distance between you and the person you were talking
to based on their relationship. “Your Sweetie” was only one fold distance,
“Family” might be two, but an “Aquantaince” would be a fully unfolded / extended
stick.



Someone had requested a talk on unit testing and I threw one together Friday
night but ended up arriving slightly late only to find that someone else had
signed up to talk about it. He did an OK job but there was a lot he didn’t
cover. I tried to get people together later in the day to fill in the gaps he
left but, alas, I guess one Unit Testing session was enough for people. I did
however, throw together a talk about Distributed Version Control Systems that a
handful of folks showed up for and seemed to go over rather well. I’d offer you
the slides to that but they were very
Takahashi
Method and were essentially focal units for talking points.
My
unit testing slides (requires Firefox), were fairly self contained and I
just now spent some time expanding them so they should prove useful to anyone
trying to get their head around the Whats, Whys, and Hows of writing tests.
PLEASE give me feedback on it. I’d really
like the opportunity to give this talk and when I do I want to be sure
everything makes sense and answers most of your questions.



The one thing I haven’t figured out how best to convey in the slides is the idea
that in order to go from thinking tests are good in the abstract (as most
developers do) to knowing they’re truly
invaluable you have to really write them throughout a project. It isn’t until
you do that that they start to save your ass repeatedly and truly demonstrate
just how much time writing them will save you.



Big thanks to the
Amoskeag
Business Incubator,
Custom Scoop,
Southern NH
University, O’Reilly,
Appropriate
Solutions, Ektron, and
Hatchling for
sponsoring Bar Camp Manchester and making it all possible.





Some advice for future young (recently out of college) people attending these:
Go talk, or at least listen, to the greybeards. It’s easy to find geeks your own
age to talk to. You don’t have many chances to talk to greybeards, especially
ones who actually care about the art of coding. They have more development
knowledge in their pinky than you’ve learned before, during, and since college.

Happy Harry Potter Day July 22, 2007

I finished Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows a few hours ago and have to say it was worth the wait. Ms. Rowling has done a wonderful job. I think it’s the best one yet. So good I’m going to go read it again now. :)

Thank you J.K. Rowling for this worderful series, for the characters and lessons, and for getting children across the world interested in reading again. There were a group of little girls at the end of my block this morning bouncing up and down yelling “Harry Potter!!” whilst eagerly awaiting the mailman with their books. I hope they didn’t have to wait too long.

On a related note. Thank you Harry And The Potters Draco and the Malfoys and the Hungarian Horntails for rocking Harvard Yard last night. I missed everyone but Harry and The Potters because I remembered Harvard SQUARE on their site even though the posters actually said Harvard YARD and it’s amazing how effective those old Harvard buildings are at absorbing sound. I didn’t hear a thing until I happened to cut across the Harvard campus.

Who Cares About Performance July 13, 2007

Justin James
asks
why nobody seems to care about performance anymore. He talks about how the
performance hit you get from using a “slow” language directly translate into
increased hardware and electricity costs just to maintain the same kind of
performance you would have had if you’d used a “fast” language or spent more
time optimizing your code. All his points are good, but they’re also all
irrelevant. You see, for most applications the performance hits you get from
slow languages or non-optimized code just don’t matter. Your system will still
be responsive enough that no-one will be bothered. People don’t care because it
just doesn’t have any noticeable effect
on the end product and 
some languages
make coding far more enjoyable and productive. Their productivity gains far
outweigh performance hits that are almost unnoticeable by end users. This is
exactly why Ruby on Rails is kicking ass and taking names. It’s not terribly
performant. Ruby is unquestionably a slow
language. The huge infrastructure of RoR makes it even slower… but it makes
developers incredibly productive and the resulting sites are “fast enough”,
especially if you take the time to host them with the correct tools.



Before I started working at Akamai I was one of those people who just didn’t
care about performance and you would have been hard pressed to convince me that
coding for performance really mattered for anyone who wasn’t coding something
like a router or OS Kernel. That was until I started being presented with
numbers that just blew my mind. Our group is currently just looking at a
very small subset of the data that flows
through Akamai’s pipes and we still have to process
hundreds of millions of log lines per
hour. I remember amazed by
a
graph showing Yaws handling 80,000 concurrent connections per second while
Apache keeled over at 4,000. “80,000!” I thought. “With performance like that we
could blow through those logs. Now lets see… Hundreds of millions divided by
80,000 is…. oh… not… even… close.” I still think that
Erlang could be an
incredible tool for some of the tasks here but even a language with incredible
concurrency support like Erlang isn’t, alone, enough to deal with the sheer
scale of things here. You have to care
about performance at Akamai. It’s not just what we sell to our customers, it’s
the only way for us to survive what we
sell to our customers.



I still believe that for most developers language and framework choices are more
important that worrying about performance, but now I understand what a sheltered
view of the world I had and how that view fits into the larger world. Joining
Akamai combined with a recent series of small performance related events has
opened my eyes to just what a dramatic choice it can make when you do start
taking performance into account. Yes things are generally “fast enough” but you
will kick your competitors asses when their products are “fast enough” but yours
is instantaneous. “Lightning fast” is a more compelling feature than you would
ever guess. It’s pointless marketspeak in a feature list but once you experience
it it’s damn hard to walk away.

Perforce July 9, 2007

*bursts through the door with wild eyes and a kitchen knife. Sights Perforce. Lunges at it and stabs repeatedly.*

StabStabStab

*drops the knife and runs out of the room cackling madly*

NO version control system has a feature set that is good enough to justify all the crap you have to go through to actually start using Perforce.

Nervously Excited July 6, 2007

This new job is unlike any other for me, and I’m totally psyched. Akamai is a
company that is honestly unlike any other in the world. We have 25,000+ servers
spread around the world serving
millions
of hits per second that literally
add up to 20% of the internet’s traffic. And that gives us a truly unique
perspective on things. The project I’m working on is still pretty hush hush but
the cool thing about it is that our work will literally make the time you spend
on the net a little less stressy, save some of you hundreds of dollars, and in a
very real way make things better for you and millions of others. But none of you
will ever notice. Things will just be more “right”.



Through nobody’s fault I’ve got a pretty crazy first deadline (it would be fine
if I knew my way around the system already) so I’m nervous about living up to
what they need from me in these first couple months, but I’m really excited
about the project and all the cool things we can do with it as it grows. And, I
will have the chance to learn a lot of new things and really grow as a
programmer.



Working at Akamai… It’s hard to describe, probably because it’s still so
early. There are lots of really smart people and interesting challenges, but
socially it’s not as casual feeling as Google. I realize that the Googlers
really put their heads down and work but they’ve got a lot of play in them too.
Akamai feels more like a big team making a concerted and professional effort
towards a goal, fortunately the word “stuffy” has no chance of being applicable
here. Conversations are casual, relaxed, and, so far, everyone I’ve encountered
has seemed honestly interested in not only hearing what the others have to say
but learning from them. From the interview process (I interviewed with over 12
people in total (3 groups)), and the conversations I’ve been overhearing, I
think it’s safe to say that Akamai likes pragmatic programmers. The coolest
thing I can say about Akamai is that every group I’ve spoken with seems to
actively want, and be working towards, improving the thing they do, and how
they’re doing it.



Akamai was one of the dot com darlings, and when the crash hit it took a lot of
their customers with it. Surviving through those hard times has given Akamai a
very considered and thoughtful approach to things. Google does a lot of things
right, and I think it’s the perfect place for some people, but I think fate has
once again put me in the perfect place for
me right now. Maybe we’re the right place for you right now too. If
you’re looking for a job in the Boston area drop me your resume and I’ll hook
you up with a recruiter, especially if you know Perl, or get all excited about
the idea of working with mind bogglingly large scales of data. Terabytes are
nothing around here. Tasks that involve working with billions of records are
typical. Every day I encounter some new data-point related to my work that
involves at least eight zeroes…. per
hour, or
second…
crazy I tell you, and totally cool.



Now, if only we had free soda and more floor space… but they’re working on
that, just like everything else. :)



P.S. The job descriptions on the Akamai web site are,
IMNSHO,
just plain bad. They tend to be either so generic you can’t tell what the job would be
or asking for impossibly long combinations of skills. I think it would be more
realistic to say that they’re looking for people with good web development
experience (all aspects) and if you’ve got the skills they’ll find a good place
to fit you in. Main languages are C++, Java, and Python, and they’ve got a fair
amount of existing Perl they could really use some people for.



P.P.S. What’s the deal with Perl just not being cool any more? They have
so got to get Perl 6 released.

Java: The Mediocre Date July 1, 2007

I’ve been programming in Java professionally for years now, and while I’ve
become good at it, it’s never grown into a language I’ve been passionate about.
It’s powerful, has tons of good libraries and tools but… It’s like going out
on a nice date with someone but having no desire to ask them out for a second.
You wouldn’t mind another dinner with them, and since you’ve got a common circle
of friends you probably will, but you’re never going to get the butterflies in
the tummy when you think about seeing them again. I’ve met a lot of people
who’ve been out on a date with Java, and so far none of them seem to have tummy
butterflies either.



Veritable religious wars break out over languages like Python, Perl, and Ruby,
even C++ has it’s zealots but Java? People use Java because it’s stable, it’s
got good tools, it can scale, and when you mention it to your customers they’ve
heard of it and can nod as if they have a clue. Java is the
Big Blue of
languages. “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.” they would say. People
learn Java because they can get jobs in it. People learn Ruby because she’s hot,
and when you start fooling around she makes some incredible noises.



I’m sure Java and I will keep having dinners together but we both know it’s just
business. In the meantime I’m going to see about getting another date with that
Perl chick. Everyone else has written her off like
Hermione,
because of her frizzy hair. But I know the truth. She’s gorgeous when she wants
to be and under all that frizz lies a dam sexy brain.