Posts

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! ...

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. ...

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 ...

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. ...

A coworker whipped up a generic REST interface for any Ruby on Rails activerecord (data model). What he described (in 5 minutes) was a nice implementation. I wanted see how the generic django REST interface was coded. http://code.google.com/p/django-rest-interface/ I was pleasantly surprised to realize that they Python developers simply used the normal form processing to handle rest and didn’t invent a new paradigm. On an early project we tried to implement RESTlet for a java based REST application. Under load we saw some strange problems and the code was reverted to normal servlets without too much pain. ...