my Barcamp Philly 2010 summary

Every year Philly’s BarCarmp gets better. Last year I met great people and learned new tactics from my peers. This year I enjoyed a number of roundtable discussions where we taught each other and had my core paradigms challenged. (of couse still met great people, but that is implied) The day opened last night with a fantastic hosted party @indyhall. It had a vibe that reminded me of my college days where the future was bright and everyone you talked to has excitement around what they were doing....

November 14, 2010 · 4 min · Aaron Held

Designing a new Infrastructure is like buying a new car

Because I happen to be both buying a new car and deploying new infrastructure the realization dawned upon me about how similar these two activities are. You start the investigation with some preconceived “gut-level” notions. code: Multiprocess distributed job engine is what I need car : I want a Mazda 3 with “Zoom Zoom” Everybody has a story about why your choice is bad code: “In my last job I used a python-C++ wrapper from vcron” car : My cousin"s friends brother had a mazda and the engine fell out on 95...

June 17, 2009 · 3 min · Aaron Held

Peeling back the onion of stupidity

I’ve mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkiesin a previous post and I’m not seeing the value in a common language for discussing problems. Today’s pattern is the ‘Onion of Stupidity’. This is a common pattern where you build up hack upon workaround upon compromise, inject a little shortsightedness and wind up seeing a good chunk of your effort goes into cleaning it up. A colleague here promoted the term “technical debt” to describe issues were we these types of issues and help us prioritize them....

May 7, 2009 · 2 min · Aaron Held

coupling de-coupled CMS

I’m hip deep in the design of a new CMS to power some large scale sites. The big buzzword going on at this level is around how the CMS products are designed to be ‘de-coupled’. Specifically we are talking about decoupling the deliver of the site from the management of the content. This is very understandable, as your backend needs can be very different then the portal. The backend CMS has rigid security and workflow concerns and the front-end is optimized to serve pages fast....

April 27, 2009 · 1 min · Aaron Held

grails java.sql.SQLException: Table not found in statement [insert into

I’m spinning up a new grails experiment this weekend and ran into an error that I could not effectively google. So hopefully by adoping the very SEO style title others will benefit. I really want to like grails, it is a full stack web development framework modeled after Ruby on Rails but written Groovy with full access to the JVM. I have an excellent project in mind for some facebook integration using a Java library I’ve some experience with so grails seemed to fit....

March 8, 2009 · 2 min · Aaron Held