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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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Recently this little gem crossed my Inbox.... Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last By J----- A----- Do you trust a doctor with diagnosing your mental problems if the doctor tells you he's got 20 years of experience? Do you still trust that doctor when he picks up his tools, and asks you to prepare for a lobotomy? Would you still be impressed if the doctor had 20 years of experience in carrying out lobotomies? I am always skeptic when people tell me they have X years of experience in a certain field or discipline, like "5 years of experience as a .NET developer", "8 years of experience as a project manager" or "12 years of experience as a development manager". It is as if people's professional levels need to be measured in years of practice. This, of course, is nonsense. Professionalism is measured by what you are going to do now ... Are you going to use some discredited technique from half a century ago? • Are you, as a .NET developer, going to use Response.Write, because you've got 5 years of experience doing exactly that? • Are you, as a project manager, going to create Gantt charts, because that's what you've been doing for 8 years? • Are you, as a development manager, going to micro-manage your team members, as you did in the 12 years before now? If so, allow me to illustrate the value of your experience... (Photo of "Zero" signs) Here's an example of what it means to be a professional: There's a concept called Kanban making headlines these days in some parts of the agile community. I honestly and proudly admit that I have no experience at all in applying Kanban. But that's just a minor inconvenience. Because I have attained the knowledge of what it is and what it can be good for. And now there are some planning issues in our organization for which this Kanban-stuff might be the perfect solution. I'm sure we're going to give it a shot, in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards. That's the way a professional tries to solve a problem. Professionals don't match problems with their experiences. They match them with their knowledge. Sure, experience is useful. But only when you already have the knowledge in place. Experience has no value when there's no knowledge to verify that you are applying the right experience. Knowledge Comes First, Experience Comes Last This is my message to anyone who wants to be a professional software developer, a professional project manager, or a professional development 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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The Pragmatic Programmer says, "Learn a new language every year". This is great advice, not just because it puts new tools into your mental toolbox that you can pull out on various occasions to get a job done, but also because it opens your mind to new ideas and new concepts that will filter their way into your code even without explicit language support. For example, suppose you've looked at (J/Iron)Ruby or Groovy, and come to like the "internal iterator" approach as a way of simplifying moving across a collection of objects in a uniform way; for political and cultural reasons, though, you can't write code in anything but Java. You're frustrated, because local anonymous functions (also commonly--and, I think, mistakenly--called closures ) are not a first-class concept in Java. Then, you later look at Haskell/ML/Scala/F#, which makes heavy use of what Java programmers would call "static methods" to carry out operations, and realize that this could, in fact, be adapted to Java to give you the "internal iteration" concept over the Java Collections: 1: package com.tedneward.util; 2: 3: import java.util.*; 4: 5: public interface Acceptor 6: { 7: public void each(Object obj); 8: } 9: 10: public class Collection 11: { 12: public static void each(List list, Acceptor acc) 13: { 14: for (Object o : list) 15: acc.each(o); 16: } 17: } Where using it would look like this: 1: import com.tedneward.util.*; 2: 3: List personList = ...; 4: Collection.each( new Accpetor() { 5: public void each(Object person) { 6: System.out.println( "Found person " + person + ", isn't that nice?" ); 7: } 8: }); Is it quite as nice or as clean as using it from a language that has first-class support for anonymous local functions? No, but slowly migrating over to this style has a couple of definitive effects, most notably that you will start grooming the rest of your team (who may be reluctant to pick up these new languages) towards the new ideas that will be present in Groovy, and when they finally do see them (as they will, eventually, unless they hide under rocks on a daily basis), they will realize what's going on here that much more quickly, and start adding their voices to the call to start using (J/Iron)Ruby/Groovy for certain things in the codebase you support. (By the way, this is so much easier to do in C# 2.0, thanks to generics, static classes and anonymous delegates... 1: namespace TedNeward.Util 2: { 3: public delegate void EachProc<T>(T obj); 4: public static class Collection Read More...
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I've been asked to put together a list of the "best" Java resources that every up-and-coming Java developer should have, and I'd like this list to be as comprehensive as possible and, more importantly, reflect more than just my own opinion. So, either through comments or through email , let me know what you think the best Java resources are in the following categories: Websites and developer Web portals Weblogs/RSS feeds. (Not all have to be hand-authored blogs--if you find an RSS feed for news on java.net projects, for example, that would count as well.) Java packages and/or libaries. (Either those within Java Standard Edition--a la Reflection or the Scripting API--or from Enterprise Edition--a la JMS--or even third-party packages, a la Spring.) Conferences, even including those that I don't speak at. ;-) Books. Tools. (IDEs, build tools, static analysis tools, either commercial or open source.) Future trends you think bear watching. There is, of course, no prize to be won here, and I'd please ask the vendors (commercial or open source) who watch my blog to avoid outright advertisements in comments (though you are free to rattle off the various advantages of your product in an email to me), in order to avoid turning this weblog into a gigantic row of billboards along the freeway. I am interested in peoples' opinions, however, and more importantly, why you think X should be on that list, or even why Y shouldn't. Keep it civil, though, please--I'll delete any comments that get too vindictive or offensive. (That doesn't mean that you have to agree with me--just avoid calling anybody names. Basic 'Netiquette.) Oh, and if you want to be mentioned in the article (which will be published on an international developer site), please indicate how you'd like to be accredited. Or not. Whatever you prefer. 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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Steve Yegge posted the transcript from a talk on dynamic languages that he gave at Stanford. Cedric Beust posted a response to Steve's talk, espousing statically-typed languages. Numerous comments and flamewars erupted, not to mention a Star Wars analogy (which always makes things more fun). This is my feeble attempt to play galactic peacemaker. Or at least galactic color commentary and play-by-play. I have no doubts about its efficacy, and that it will only fan the flames, for that's how these things work. Still, I feel a certain perverse pleasure in pretending, so.... Enjoy the carnage that results. First of all, let me be very honest: I like Steve's talk. I think he does a pretty good job of representing the negatives and positives of dynamic languages, though there are obviously places where I'm going to disagree: "Because we all know that C++ has some very serious problems, that organizations, you know, put hundreds of staff years into fixing. Portability across compiler upgrades, across platforms, I mean the list goes on and on and on. C++ is like an evolutionary sort of dead-end. But, you know, it's fast, right?" Funny, I doubt Bjarne Stroustrup or Herb Sutter would agree with the "evolutionary dead-end" statement, but they're biased, so let's put that aside for a moment. Have organizations put hundreds of staff years into fixing the problems of C++? Possibly--it would be good to know what Steve considers the "very serious problems" of C++, because that list he does give (compiler/platform/language upgrades and portability across platforms) seems problematic regardless of the langauge or platform you choose--Lord knows we saw that with Java, and Lord knows we see it with ECMAScript in the browser, too. The larger question should be, can, and does, the language evolve? Clearly, based on the work in the Boost libraries and the C++0X standards work, the answer is yes, every bit as much as Java or C#/.NET is, and arguably much more so than what we're seeing in some of the dynamic languages. C++ is getting a standardized memory model, which will make a portable threading package possible, as well as lambda expressions, which is a far cry from the language that I grew up with. That seems evolutionary to me. What's more, Bjarne has said, point-blank, that he prefers taking a slow approach to adopting new features or ideas, so that it can be "done right", and I think that's every bit a fair position to take, regardless of whether I agree with it or not. (I'd Read More...
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Not too long ago, Don wrote : The three most “personal” choices a developer makes are language, tool, and OS. No. That may be true for somebody who works for a large commercial or open source vendor, whose team is building something that fits into one of those three categories and wants to see that language/tool/OS succeed. That is not where most of us live. If you do, certainly, you are welcome to your opinion, but please accept with good grace that your agenda is not the same as my own. Most of us in the practitioner space are using languages, tools and OSes to solve customer problems, and making the decision to use a particular language, tool or OS a personal one generally gets us into trouble--how many developers do you know that identify themselves so closely with that decision that they include it in their personal metadata? "Hi, I'm Joe, and I'm a Java programmer." Or, "Oh, good God, you're running Windows? What are you, some kind of Micro$oft lover or something?" Or, "Linux? You really are a geek, aren't you? Recompiled your kernel lately (snicker, snicker)?" Sorry, but all of those make me want to hurl. Of these kinds of statements are technical zealotry and flame wars built. When programmers embed their choice so deeply into their psyche that it becomes the tagline by which they identify themselves, it becomes an "ego" thing instead of a "tool" thing. What's more, it involves customers and people outside the field in an argument that has nothing to do with them. Think about it for a second; the last time you hired a contractor to add a deck to your house, what's your reaction when they introduce themselves as, "Hi, I'm Kim, and I'm a Craftsman contractor." Or, overheard at the job site, "Oh, good God, you're using a Skil? What are you, some kind of nut or something?" Or, as you look at the tools on their belt, "Nokita? You really are a geek, aren't you? Rebuilt your tools from scratch lately (snicker, snicker)?" Do you, the customer, really care what kind of tools they use? Or do you care more for the quality of solution they build for you? It's hard to imagine how the discussion can even come up, it's so ludicrous. Try this one on, instead: "Hi, I'm Ted, and I'm a programmer." I use a variety of languages, tools, and OSes, and my choice of which to use are all geared around a single end goal: not to promote my own social or political agenda, but to make my customer happy . Sometimes that means using C# on Windows. Sometimes that means using Java Read More...
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Apparently, I'm drawing enough of an audience through this blog that various folks have started to send me press releases and notifications and requests for... well, I dunno exactly, but I'm assuming some blogging love of some kind. I'm always a little leery about that particular subject, because it always has this dangerous potential to turn the blog into a less-credible marketing device, but people at conferences have suggested that they really are interested in what I think about various products and tools, so perhaps it's time to amend my stance on this. With that in mind, if you are a vendor and have a product that you'd like me to take a look at and (possibly) offer up a review here, here's the basic rules: No guarantees. Sending me something will in no way guarantee that I will review your product, for several reasons, two of which being (a) I get really busy sometimes, and (b) I may have no interest whatsoever in your product and I refuse to pretend to do so. (Readers can usually tell when the reviewer isn't all that excited about the subject, I've found.) If you're not going to send me a "real" version (meaning not the time-locked or feature-crippled demo), don't bother. I have no idea when I will get around to a review, and I have no desire to review something that isn't "the real deal". I will in turn promise that the licensed version you send me (if necessary) will not be used for any purpose other than my own research and exploration (signing contract if necessary to give you that "fresh-from-the-lawyer's-office" warm and fuzzy feeling). I say what I think, pro and con. I will not edit my review to suit your marketing purpose, and if you ask me to do so I will simply note in the review that you have asked me to do so. I retain full editorial control over what I say about your product. Having established #1, I will try to be as fair as I can about your product, and point out things that I liked and things that I didn't. (Of course, if I hated it from top to bottom, I may end up with the only positive thing being "It didn't set the atmosphere on fire when I started the app", but hey, that's something positive, right?) Also in the spirit of #1, if you send me mail answering questions or complaints in my review, I will of course amend the review with your comments. You are always welcome to post comments to the blog entry itself, too. Unless you insult my grandmother, then I will have to get all DELETE-key on you. The reason I'm posting this here is 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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During the Lang.NET Symposium, a couple of things "clicked" all simultaneously, giving me one of those "Oh, I get it now" moments that just doesn't want to leave you alone. During the Intentional Software presentation, as the demo wound onwards I (and the rest of the small group gathered there) found myself looking at the same source code, but presented in a variety of new ways, some of which appealed to me as the programmer, others of which appealed to the mathematicians in the room, others of which appealed to the non-programmers in the room. (I heard one of the Microsoft hosts, a non-technical program manager, I think, say, "Wow, even I could understand that spreadsheet view, and that was writing code?") During the spreadsheet-written-in-IronPython presentation (ResolverOne), we were essentially looking at new ways of writing IronPython code, thus leveraging all the syntactic power of a programming language with a nicer front end. During the aspect-oriented talk (the one by Stefan Wenig and Fabian Schmeid), we found ourselves looking at a tool that essentially takes compiled assemblies and weaves in additional code based on descriptors from outside that codebase; in essence, just another aspect-oriented tool. But combine this with my own investigations into Soot, LLVM, Parrot, and Phoenix, alongside the usual discussions around the DLR, CLR, JVM and DaVinci machine, couple that with the presentation Harry gave about parser expression grammars and the research in the functional community into parser combinators, throw in the aspect-oriented and metaprogramming facilities that the Rubyists and other dynamic linguists go on for days about, and what do you end up with? Folks, the future is in modular toolchains . This is an oversimplification, and a radical oversimplification at that, but imagine for a moment: A parser takes your source code (let's assume it is Java, just for grins) and builds an AST out of it. Not an AST that's inherently deeply coupled to the Java language, mind you, but a general-purpose one that stands as a union of Java, C#, C++, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, and other languages. (Note that some of the linguistic concepts in some of those languages may not end up in this AST, but instead operate on the AST itself, a la C++'s template facilities.) Said parser is now finished, and can either output a binary (or potentially XML, though it'd probably be hideously verbose) version of this AST to disk for later consumption, or would more than likely Read More...
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Thought I'd offer a highly-biased interpretation of the goings-on here at the Lang.NET Symposium. Quite an interesting crowd gathered here; I don't have a full attendee roster, but it includes Erik Meijer, Brian Goetz, Anders Hjelsberg, Jim Hugunin, John Lam, Miguel de Icaza, Charlie Nutter, John Rose, Gilad Braha, Paul Vick, Karl Prosser, Wayne Kelly, Jim Hogg, among a crowd in total of about 40. Great opportunities to do those wonderful hallway chats that seem to be the far more interesting part of conferences. Jason Zander : Jason basically introduces the Symposium, and the intent of the talk was mostly to welcome everybody (including the > 50% non-Microsoft crowd here) and offer up some interesting history of the CLR and .NET, dating all the way back to a memo/email sent by Chris Brumme in 1998 about garbage collection and the "two heaps", one around COM+ objects, and the other for malloc-allocated data. Fun stuff; hardly intellectually challenging, mind you, but interesting. Anders Hjelsberg : Anders walks us through the various C# 3.0 features and how they combine to create the subtle power that is LINQ (it's for a lot more than just relational databases, folks), but if you've seen his presentation on C# 3 at TechEd or PDC or any of the other conferences he's been to, you know how that story goes. The most interesting part of his presentation was a statement he made that I think has some interesting ramifications for the industry: I think that the taxonomies of programming languages are breaking down. I think that languages are fast becoming amalgam. ... I think that in 10 years, there won't be any way to categorize languages as dynamic, static, procedural, object, and so on. (I'm paraphrasing here--I wasn't typing when he said it, so I may have it wrong in the exact wording.) I think, first of all, he's absolutely right. Looking at both languages like F# and Scala, for example, we see a definite hybridization of both functional and object languages, and it doesn't take much exploration of C#'s and VB's expression trees facility to realize that they're already a half-step shy of a full (semantic or syntactic) macro system, something that traditionally has been associated with dynamic languages. Which then brings up a new question: if languages are slowly "bleeding" out of their traditional taxonomies, how will the vast myriad hordes of developers categorize themselves? We can't call ourselves "object-oriented" developers if the taxonomy doesn't exist, Read More...
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My eight-year-old son, a few months ago, asked me what it is I do. I tried to explain to him that Daddy works as a consultant, teaching people how to build computer systems that help people do things. He thought about it a moment, then said, "So you build robots and stuff?" No, not exactly, I build software, which controls the computers. "So you program the robots to do things?" No, I build software like what runs Amazon or eBay. "So you build websites?" At which point, wisdom dawned on me, and I said, "Yes, I build websites." He thought about it a moment, then said, "Then how come your website is so boring?" With the coming of the new year comes a change in my professional life. Starting on 11 Feb, I will be working as a technical consultant to Cie Studios , an "interactive and entertainment and marketing company", which is about as far away from my traditional consulting client as I can get without leaving the industry completely. You see, Cie focuses mostly on front-end, high-gloss kinds of graphical UI things. I focus mostly on back-end, deep-in-the-bowels kinds of plumbing things. They use lots of Flash and other animation tools. I haven't figured out how to draw anything more sophisticated than a stick figure (and believe me, my kids laughed at me last time I drew them in stick figures.) They make things like Nitto 1320 Legends , a free online combination of racing and social networking. I make things like HR systems for big corporations. My parents thought the Cie website was cool and attractive; they barely understand what a "high-scale transactional enterprise system" does, much less why anybody would pay for somebody to help them build it. Talk about your odd couples. Nevertheless, I've found a nearly-full-time home for a while, and we're all pretty excited about the partnership. The project I'm working on? Can't say much about it now, but suffice it to say, Cie is looking to leverage my love for programming language design & implementation in a new entertainment project.... which, of course, my kids are excited about, because for the first time they'll actually have something they can look at that Dad built. (Actually, I'm kinda excited about that part, too.) The tradeoff here is obvious: they teach me about Flash and making user interfaces that are more exciting than my usual console application front-end, and I teach them... uh... I teach them... let's see.... well, anyway, they're happy with the arrangement. Fortunately, they're also happy Read More...
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