1800 got Junk?

I recently purchased a ‘pre-forclosure’ townhouse and it was cluttered with a serious amount of stuff. My first thought was to rent a dumpster and hire some movers to help me empty the house. That would have cost about $6-$700. I’ve been seeing the 1800 Got Junk trucks around the neighborhood so I thought I’d give them a try. The website was excellent with a design and IA that allowed me to quickly accomplish what I came there to do. I setup an appointment for the next business day and got a price estimate. ...

July 2, 2008 · 2 min · Aaron Held

the trifecta of personal projects

The joys of home ownership pressing demands at work have stifled my personal innovation time. Sometime in the last millennium I used be enjoy writing exploratory projects and releasing libraries that others may find useful. Over the last few months I’ve been looking for inspiration for a project that would help me explore some ‘search’ related ideas that have been bouncing in my head. I came across a project idea that represents the perfect personal trifecta! ...

June 9, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

The real meaning of agility

Agility is one of the most abused terms in my profession. Recent events in my day job have caused me to rethink what agility means. We have a very elegant, loosely coupled system that allows us to build entire sections of our website in hours. The framework handles everything from CDN integration to doing automated profiling every build. Software engineers have to be good at identifying the bottleneck, and over the past few days I saw how the larger teams ability to react mattered much more then the codebase itself. ...

May 31, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

Iron Man - great past the end

I thoroughly enjoyed the Iron Man movie. My son wanted more of a SpaceMarine clunky feel to the armor, but I though they nailed exactly how I saw Iron Man from my youth. At least half the theater stayed past the credit roll, I was surprised by how many people knew about the extra bit. It took some real willpower to sit through the endless list of names after consuming a super giant-sized soda and getting to a 2 hour movie 45min early ...

May 4, 2008 · 1 min · Aaron Held

SpringSource - proving once again Java doesn't get the web

I just read an article in a java trade mag entitled: SpringSource CEO: “The Future of Enterprise Java is Clear and Bright” The premise sounds positive. Basically they took OSGI, Spring and threw it on Tomcat as a web server. The idea of being able to deploy OSGI bundles with the bag of beans development style of Spring is really compelling. What this negative post is about is how they still don’t get the ‘web’. My biggest issue with Java web development is that not enough attention is paid to modern web basics. The very first thing that I noticed on the SpringSource website was the 15 year old style url. ...

May 1, 2008 · 2 min · Aaron Held