Lots of traffic on Twitter about Steve Yegge’s post defining a “software ideology” spectrum. Myles Recny made a survey to help you place yourself along said spectrum. Thinking about it over the weekend, I can’t identify with this framing of software development. Those survey questions don’t seem to cover what I think about most in […]
I’m looking for a new personal weekend project that would be useful to others. Maybe there’s a useful book or useful piece of software I could create for fellow developers, tech leads, project managers, etc. Doesn’t have to be anything related to any of my current or past work (Linux, C, GTK+, Scala, etc.), but […]
In honor of GUADEC 2012, a post about desktop UI. (On Linux, though I think some of these points could apply to Windows and OS X.) When I’m working, I have to stop and think when I flip between two tabs or windows. If I don’t stop and think, I flip to the wrong destination […]
Once you think you have a good answer to an important problem, it’s time to drive everyone crazy looking for an even better answer. Here’s a scenario I’ve been through more times than I can count: I thought I had a pretty good approach, or didn’t think anything better was possible, and wasn’t looking to […]
In several real-world cases I’ve had a pair of types like this: An implicit often leaves a policy decision undecided. At some layer of your code, though, you want to make the decision and stick to it. Passing around a tuple with an object and the implicit needed to invoke its methods can be awkward. […]
Most of my career has been in commercial companies related to open source. I learned to code just out of college at a financial company using Linux. I was at Red Hat from just before the IPO when we were selling T-shirts as a business model, until just before the company joined the S&P500. I […]
On the sbt mailing list there’s a discussion of where to go with “cross versioning.” Here’s how I’ve been thinking about it. Disclaimer I’m a relative newcomer to the Scala community. If I push anyone’s buttons it’s not intentional. This is a personal opinion. Summary Two theories: The largest problem created by changing ABI contracts […]
My latest work project was a quick side-track to unify the config file handling for Akka 2.0 and Play 2.0. The result is on GitHub and feels pretty well-baked. Patches have now landed in both Akka and Play, thanks to Patrik and Peter. I can’t make this project seem glamorous. It was a code cleanup […]
TL;DR Modern application development platforms are addressing the related issues of globally-coordinated task dispatch and nonblocking IO. Here’s my definition of the problem, an argument for why it matters, and some suggestions for specific standard library features to add to Scala in particular. The same ideas apply to any application development platform, though. It’s rapidly […]
Often when our minds turn to design, we think first of cosmetics. With all the talk of Apple these days, it’s easy to think they’re successful because of shiny aluminum or invisible screw holes. But this is a side issue. The Steve Jobs quote that gets to the heart of product development might be: So […]