I’ve mentioned the book Adrenaline Junkies in 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. I’m thinking that my Onion is more about ‘strategy debt’. The onion is usually built with best intentions at all sides. ...

Sometimes the answer really isn’t that hard. We were recently having a lunch conversation and talking about how to get involved in the local tech community. Kevin simply stated “Just show up”. It was a stunningly simple answer. To people that have had the great experience of being involved in the Philly tech scene this seems obvious. As a Gen ‘X’er that moved around the east coast during the dotCom days let me say this is an unual and fantastic community. Back in the day there was some feeling of elitism and you had to demonstrate some effort to be included in a ‘community’. Its true that a ’noob (great word, best contribution of the ‘millenials’ so far ;) could show up at the local Linux install day and get some help setting up slackware on left over office equipment, but they were not taken seriously in the ‘real’ meetings. ...

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. ...

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. ...

I’m starting to get used to Comcast’s smartzone webmail front end. It is an ajaxy / desktopish mail client that exposes way more functionality then the old one. This type of functionality usually comes at a price, and in this case the price was having to use a mouse. There are a number of keyboard shortcuts, but the it is a full page help buried in the preferences pane. I prefer the narrow right-hand window like the type seen in some Microsoft office products. ...