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For those of you who were at the Cinncinnati NFJS show, please continue on to the next blog entry in your reader--you've already heard this. For those of you who weren't, then allow me to make the announcement: Hi. My name's Ted Neward, and I am now a ThoughtWorker . After four months of discussions, interviews, more discussions and more interviews, I can finally say that ThoughtWorks and I have come to a meeting of the minds, and starting 3 September I will be a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks. My role there will be to consult, write, mentor, architect and speak on Java, .NET, XML Services (and maybe even a little Ruby), not to mention help ThoughtWorks' clients achieve IT success in other general ways. Yep, I'm basically doing the same thing I've been doing for the last five years. Except now I'm doing it with a TW logo attached to my name. By the way, ThoughtWorkers get to choose their own titles, and I'm curious to know what readers think my title should be. Send me your suggestions, and if one really strikes home, I'll use it and update this entry to reflect the choice. I have a few ideas, but I'm finding that other people can be vastly more creative than I, and I'd love to have a title that rivals Neal's "Meme Wrangler" in coolness. Oh, and for those of you who were thinking this, "Seat Warmer" has already been taken, from what I understand. Honestly, this is a connection that's been hovering at the forefront of my mind for several years. I like ThoughtWorks' focus on success, their willingness to explore new ideas (both methodologies and technologies), their commitment to the community, their corporate values, and their overall attitude of "work hard, play hard". There have definitely been people who came away from ThoughtWorks with a negative impression of the company, but they're the minority. Any company that encourages T-shirts and jeans, XBoxes in the office, and wants to promote good corporate values is a winner in my book. In short, ThoughtWorks is, in many ways, the consulting company that I would want to build, if I were going to build a consulting firm. I'm not a wild fan of the travel commitments, mind you, but I am definitely no stranger to travel, we've got some ideas about how I can stay at home a bit more, and frankly I've been champing at the bit to get injected into more agile and team projects, so it feels like a good tradeoff. Plus, I get to think about languages and platforms in a more competitive and hostile way--not that TW Read More...
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This comment deserves response: First of all, if you're quoting my post, blocking out my name, and attacking me behind my back by calling me "our intrepid troll", you could have shown the decency of linking back to my original post. Here it is, for those interested in the real discussion: http://www.agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/professionalism-knowledge-first Well, frankly, I didn't get your post from your blog, I got it from an email 'zine (as indicated by the comment "This crossed my Inbox..."), and I didn't really think that anybody would have any difficulty tracking down where it came from, at least in terms of the email blast that put it into my Inbox. Coupled with the fact that, quite honestly, I don't generally make a practice of using peoples' names without their permission (and my email to the author asking if I could quote the post with his name attached generated no response), so I blocked out the name. Having said that, I'm pleased to offer full credit as to its source. Now, let's review some of your remarks: "COBOL is (at least) twenty years old, so therefore any use of COBOL must clearly be as idiotic." I never talked about COBOL, or any other programming language. I was talking about old practices that are nowadays considered harmful and seriously damaging. (Like practising waterfall project management, instead of agile project management.) I don't see how programming in COBOL could seriously damage a business. Why do you compare COBOL with lobotomies? I don't understand. I couldn't care less about programming languages. I care about management practices. Frankly, the distinction isn't very clear in your post, and even more frankly, to draw a distinction here is a bit specious. "I didn't mean we should throw away the good stuff that's twenty years old, only the bad stuff!" doesn't seem much like a defense to me. There are cases where waterfall style development is exactly the right thing to do a more agile approach is exactly the wrong thing to do--the difference, as I'm fond of saying, lies entirely in the context of the problem. Analogously, there are cases where keeping an existing COBOL system up and running is the wrong thing to do, and replacing it with a new system is the right thing to do. It all depends on context, and for that reason, any dogmatic suggestion otherwise is flawed. "How can a developer honestly claim to know "what it can be good for", without some kind of experience to back it?" I'm talking about gaining Read More...
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If you've peeked at my blog site in the last twenty minutes or so, you've probably noticed some churn in the template in the upper-left corner; by now, it's been finalized, and it reads "JOB REFERRALS". WTHeck? Has Ted finally sold out? Sort of, not really. At least, I don't think so. Here's the deal: the company behind those ads, Entice Labs, contacted me to see if I was interested in hosting some job ads on my blog, given that I seem to generate a moderate amount of traffic. I figured it was worthwhile to at least talk to them, and the more I did, the more I liked what I heard--the ads are focused specifically at developers of particular types (I chose a criteria string of "Software Developers", subcategorized by "Java, .NET, .NET (Visual Basic), .NET (C#), C++, Flex, Ruby on Rails, C, SQL, JavaScript, HTML" though I'm not sure whether "HTML" will bring in too many web-designer jobs), and visitors to my blog don't have to click through the ads to get to the content, which was important to me. And, besides, given the current economic climate, if I can help somebody find a new job, I'd like to. Now for the full disclaimer: I will be getting money back from these job ads, though how much, to be honest with you, I'm not sure. I'm really not doing this for the money, so I make this statement now: I will take 50% of whatever I make through this program and donate it to a charitable organization. The other 50% I will use to offset travel and expenses to user groups and/or CodeCamps and/or for-free conferences put on throughout the country. (Email me if you know of one that you're organizing or attending and would like to see me speak at, and I'll tell you if there's any room in the budget left for it. :-) ) Anyway, I figured if the ads got too obnoxious, I could always remove them; it's an experiment of sorts. Tell me what you think. Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details . Read More...
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As Amanda notes , I'm riding with 46 other folks (and lots of beer) on a bus from Michigan to devLink in Tennessee, as part of sponsoring the show. (I think she got my language preferences just a teensy bit mixed up, though.) Which brings up a related point, actually: Amanda (of "the great F# T-shirt" fame from TechEd this year) and I are teaming up to do F# In A Nutshell for O'Reilly. The goal is to have a Rough Cut ready (just the language parts) by the time F# goes CTP this summer or fall, so we're on an accelerated schedule. If you don't see much from me via the blog for a while, now you know why. :-) Once that's done, I'm going dark on a Scala book to follow--details to follow when that contract is nailed down. Meanwhile.... As she suggests, the bus will likely be filled with lots of lively debate. The nice thing about having a technical debate with drunk geeks on a bus traveling down the highway at speed is that it's actually pretty easy to win the debate, if you really want to: "You are such an idiot! Object-relashunal mappers are just... *burp* so cool! Why can't you see that?" "Idiot, am I? I demand satisfaction! Step outside, sir!" "Fine, you--" WHOOSH ... THUMP-THUMP.... "Next?" I'm looking forward to this. :-) Editor's note: (Contact Amanda if you're interested in participating.) Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details . Read More...
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A couple of people have asked me over the last few weeks, so it's probably worth saying out loud: No, I don't work for a large company, so yes, I'm available for consulting and research projects. If you've got one of those burning questions like, "How would our company/project/department/whatever make use of JRuby-and-Rails, and what would the impact to the rest of the system be", or "Could using F# help us write applications faster", or "How would we best integrate Groovy into our application", or "How does the new Adobe Flex/AIR move help us build richer client apps", or "How do we improve the performance of our Java/.NET app", or other questions along those lines, drop me a line and let's talk. Not only will I cook up a prototype describing the answer, but I'll meet with your management and explain the consequences of the research, both pro and con, for them to evaluate. Shameless call for consulting complete, now back to the regularly-scheduled programming. Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details . Read More...
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My Mac froze when I tried to hook it up to the projector in the afternoon to do a 15-minute chat on Scala, thus losing the running blog entry in its entirety. Crap. This is my attempt to piece this overview together from memory--accordingly, details may suffer. Check the videos for verification when they come out. Of course, details were never my long suit anyway, so you probably want to do that for all of these posts, come to think of it... I got to the conference about a half-hour late, owing to some personal errands in the morning; as I got there, Wayne Kelly was talking about his work on the Ruby.NET compiler. Wayne Kelly : Parsing Ruby is made much harder by the fact that there is no Ruby specification to work from, which means the parser can't easily be generated from a parser generator. He tried, but couldn't get it to work cleanly and finally gave up in favor of getting to the "fun stuff" of code generation. Fortunately, the work he spent on the parser was generalized into the Gardens Point Parser Generator tools, which are also used in other environments and are included (?) as part of the Visual Studio SDK download. Good stuff. Ruby.NET uses a "wrapper" class around the .NET type that contains a hash of all the symbols for that type, which permits them to avoid even constructing (or even knowing!) the actual .NET type behind the scenes, except in certain scenarios where they have to know ahead of time. Interesting trick--probably could be used to great effect in a JSR-223 engine. (I know Rhino makes use of something similar, though I don't think they defer construction of the Java object behind the Rhino object.) In general, I'm hearing this meme that "Ruby's lack of a specification is making X so much harder". I hate to draw the parallel, but it's highly reminiscent of the state of Perl until Perl 6, when Larry decided it was finally time to write a language specification (and the language has languished ever since), but maybe it's time for Matz or another Ruby digerati to sit down and write a formal specification for the Ruby language. Or even just its grammar. Luke Hoban : Luke is the PM on the F# team, which is a language that I've recently been spending some quality time with, so I'm looking forward to this talk and how he presents the language. (Note to self: steal slides... I mean leverage slides... for my own future presentations on F#.) Not surprisingly, he makes pretty heavy use of the F# Interactive window in Visual Studio, using a trick Read More...
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No snow last night, which means we avoid a repeat of the Redmond-wide shutdown of all facilities due to a half-inch of snow, and thus we avoid once again the scorn of cities all across the US for our wimpiness in the face of fluffy cold white stuff. Erik Meijer : It's obvious why Erik is doing his talk at 9AM, because the man has far more energy than any human being has a right to have at this hour of the morning. Think of your hyperactive five-year-old nephew. On Christmas morning. And he's getting a G.I. Joe Super Bazooka With Real Bayonet Action(TM). Then you amp him up on caffeine and sugar. And speed. Start with Erik's natural energy, throw in his excitement about Volta, compound in the fact that he's got the mic cranked up to 11 and I'm sitting in the front row and... well, this talk would wake the dead. Volta , for those who haven't seen it before, is a MSIL->JavaScript transformation engine, among other things. In essence, he wants to let .NET developers write code in their traditional control-eventhandler model, then transform it automatically into a tier-split model when developers want to deploy it to the Web. (Erik posted a description of it to LtU , as well.) He's said a couple of times now that "Volta stretches the .NET platform to cover the Cloud", and from one perspective this is true--Volta automatically "splits" the code (in a manner I don't quite understand yet) to run Javascript in the browser and some amount of server-side code that remains in .NET. A couple of thoughts came to mind when I first saw this, and they still haven't gone away: How do I control the round trips? If Volta is splitting the code, do I have control over what runs locally (on the server) and what runs remotely (in the browser)? The fact that Volta will help break things out from synchronous calls is nice, but I get much better perf and scale from avoiding the remote call entirely. [Erik answers this later, sort of: use of the RunAtOrigin attribute on a class defines that class to run on the server. He also addresses this again later in the section marked "End-to-End Profiling". Apparently you use a tool called "Rotunda" to profile where the tier split would be most effective.] How do I avoid the least-common denominator problem? Any time a library or language has tried to "cover up" the differences between the various UI models, it's left a bad taste in my mouth. Volta doesn't try to hide the markup, per se , but it's not hard to imagine a model where somebody says, Read More...
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... or if you're a-hankering to kick my *ss over my sacreligious statements about Perl, I'll be at Building 20 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, at the Language.NET Symposium with a few other guys who know something about language and VM implementation: Jim Hugunin, Gilad Bracha, Wayne Kelly, Charlie Nutter, John Rose, John Lam, Erik Meijer, Anders Hejlsberg.... I wish there were more "other VMs" representation showing up (some of the Parrot or Strongtalk or Squeak folks would offer up some great discussion points), but in the event they don't, it'll still be an interesting discussion. Some of the topics I'm looking forward to: "Targeting DLR" (Martin Maly) "Multiple Languages on the Java VM" (John Rose and Charles Nutter) "Vision of the DLR" (Jim Hugunin) "Retargeting DLR" (Seo Sanghyeon) "Ruby" (John Lam) "Ruby.NET" (Wayne Kelly) "Integrating Languages into the VSS" (Aaron Marten) [I presume VSS means Visual Studio Shell and not Visual Source Safe...] "JScript" (Pratap Lakshman) [He can't be looking forward to this, based on what I'm hearing about the debates around ECMAScript 4.0....] "Volta" (Erik Meijer) "Parsing Expression Grammars in F#" (Harry Pierson) [I can't be certain, but I think I turned Harry on to F# in the first place, so I'm curious to learn what he's doing with it in Real Life] And for those of you living within easy driving distance of Redmond, take a trip out to DigiPen this Saturday and Sunday for the Seattle Code Camp . I'll be doing a talk on F# and another one on Scala on Saturday (modulo any scheduling changes ). Those of you already coming should check out the xUnit.NET presentation (currently scheduled for 4:45PM on Saturday)--some of James' and Brad's ideas of what a unit-testing framework should really look like are kinda radical, very intriguing, and guaranteed to be thought-provoking. Dunno if there's an xUnit.JVM yet... ... but there should be. Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details . Read More...
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From the cover of Dr. Dobb's Journal (Jan/2008): PHP: The Power Behind Web 2.0 The article goes on to take a much less aggressive tone, simply saying that PHP is a good language for building web sites/applications that make use of Ajax and Web services, but let's be honest: you walk into a bar anywhere in the San Jose, Burlington or Redmond areas and say that kind of thing out loud, yer gonna get tossed out on yer keester.> Only because you're saying "Web 2.0", mind you. *shudder* All those in favor of "alt.death.to.tim.oreilly.for.coining.that.phrase" newsgroup, say Aye.... Enterprise consulting, mentoring or instruction. Java, C++, .NET or XML services. 1-day or multi-day workshops available. Contact me for details . Read More...
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This is, without a doubt, the most accurate quote ever about the "fun" of writing a book: Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. ( Source : Winston Churchill) Keep that in mind, all you who are considering authoring as a career or career supplement. Were I to offer my own, it would be like so: Writing a book is like having a child. Trying is the best part, in some ways. You have this idea, this burning sensation in your heart, that just has to get out into the world. But you need a partner, a publisher who will help you bring your vision to life. You write proposals, you write tables of contents, you imagine the book cover in your mind. Then, YES! You get a publisher to agree. You sign the contract, fax it in, and you are on the way! We are authoring! At first, it is wonderful and exciting and full of potential. You run into a few hangups, a few periods of nausea as you realize the magnitude of what you're really doing. You resolve to press on. As you continue, you begin to feel like you're in control again, but you start to get this sense like it's an albatross, a weight around your neck. Before long, you're dragging your feet, you can't seem to muster the energy to do anything, just get this thing done . The deadline approaches, the sheer horror of what's left to be done paralyzes you. You look your editor in the eye (literally or figuratively) and say, "I can't do this." The editor says, "Push". You whimper, "Don't make me do this, just cancel the contract." The editor says, "Push". You scream at them, "This is YOUR fault, you MADE me do this!" The editor says, "Push". Then, all of a sudden, it's done, it's out, it's on the shelf, and you take photos and show it off to all the friends, neighbors and family, who look at you a little sympathetically, and don't mention how awful you really look in that photo. As the book is out in the world, you feel a sense of pride an joy at it. You imagine it profoundly changing the way people look at the world. You imagine it reaching bestseller lists. You're already practicing the speech for the Nobel. You're sitting in your study, you reach out and grab one of the free copies still sitting on your desk, and you open to a random page. Uh, oh. There's a typo, or a mistake, Read More...
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"Hi. My name's Ted, and I write shitty code." With this opening, a group of us earlier this year opened a panel (back in March, as I recall) at the No Fluff Just Stuff conference in Minneapolis. Neal Ford started the idea, whispering it to me as we sat down for the panel, and I immediately followed his opening statement in the same vein. Poor Charles Nutter, who was new to the tour, didn't get the whispered-down-the-line instruction, and tried valiantly to recover the panel's apparent collective discard of dignity--"Hi, I'm Charles, and I write Ruby code"--to no avail. (He's since stopped trying.) The reason for our declaration of impotent implementation, of course, was, as this post states so well , a Zen-like celebration of our inadequacies: To be a Great Programmer, you must admit that you are a Terrible Programmer. To those who count themselves as the uninitiated into our particular brand of philosophy (or religion, or just plain weirdness), the declaration is a statement of anti-Perfectionism. "I am human, therefore I make mistakes. If I make mistakes, then I cannot assume that I will write code that has no mistakes. If I cannot write code that has no mistakes, then I must assume that mistakes are rampant within the code. If mistakes are rampant within the code, then I must find them. But because I make mistakes, then I must also assume that I make mistakes trying to identify the mistakes in the code. Therefore, I will seek the best support I can find in helping me find the mistakes in my code. " This support can come in a variety of forms. The Terrible Programmer cites several of his favorites: use of the Statically-Typed Language (in his case, Ada), Virulent Assertions, Testing Masochism, the Brutally Honest Code Review, and Zeal for the Visible Crash. Myself, I like to consider other tools as well: the Static Analysis Tool Suite, a Commitment to Confront the Uncomfortable Truth, and the Abject Rejection of Best Practices. By this point in time, most developers have at least heard of, if not considered adoption of, the Masochistic Testing meme. Fellow NFJS'ers Stuart Halloway and Justin Gehtland have founded a consultancy firm, Relevance, that sets a high bar as a corporate cultural standard: 100% test coverage of their code. Neal Ford has reported that ThoughtWorks makes similar statements, though it's my understanding that clients sometimes put accidental obstacles in their way of achieving said goal. It's amibtious, but as the ancient American Indian Read More...
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