Time to grow-up

This sort of thing is becoming a problem in tech, maybe it's time to grow-up.

From my point of view it's an unhealthy mix of of hyperbole ('rock-star', 'edgy', 'hero'), Adult Swim, and juvenile humor movies (someone at the Paying Day Job seriously commented that 'Van Wilder' is a 'classic' movie).

I'm not big on organized religion but this seems particularly apropos:

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

Grow-up guys.

Daily math

Started reading Goldblatt's "Topoi" this morning waiting for someone to let me into the Paying Day Job.

Just into the Intro but it's quite good.

The book is available online (Cornell I believe), but the formatting is munged and no diagrams, so the hardcopy is nice.

The Aging Programmer

I commented on this blog entry this morning.

This sort of thing pops-up now and again with various degrees of success.

One the one hand I've felt some of the ageist pressure, on the other most of the analysis is flawed and overly emotional.

At the end of the day it boils down to what have you done lately and what can you do for me now?

Appropriate use

Over the weekend I sent a link to MagLev to the CTO of the Paying Day Job.

His reply was

Remind me to look at this later when we are focused on tuning the system...

to which I replied

Putting performance and scalability off to 'later' is not a good idea. Performance and scalability are by design, not a bolt-on.

Monday this came-up with one of the Architects who brought up the optimization canard.

When building things in the real world various materials have an appropriate use. You can use materials inappropriately, however there is usually a price to pay.

In computing we tend to ignore this for a variety of reasons. Generally I attribute this to the plasticity of the media and the fact that there's not a lot of difference between one tool and another.

However, when you pick the slowest language in the Shootout and then couple it with a single-threaded framework (we're frozen pre 2.2) you know that you're not building a system that can handle 100's of transactions per second.

You can build a F1 car on an F-150 chassis, just don't expect to be competitive.

RESTful Java

I'm sure I'm the last to know but I'm finding Jersey pretty cool.

A couple jars including the Grizzly NIO http server and I've got a no muss no fuss RESTful app server that doesn't take ANY xml to get up & running.

Annotate (which I love), code, and run.

Self (prototype objects)

Nice blog on Self.

So many languages, so little time.