Kyle Cordes

Historically I have not been a fan of “frameworks”, and I have often repeated the following joke:
What’s the difference between an application and a framework?
An application is something a customer actually wants!
However, for some applications, I recommend use of an application framework. For some Oasis Digital projects, I require it:
Please, Use a Web Application Framework
My […]

A couple of months ago I posted about using the current model Comtrol RocketModem IV with Debian / Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu/Debian includes an older “rocket” module driver in-the-box, which works well for older RocketModem IV cards. But for the newest cards, it does not work at all. The current RocketModem IV is not recognized by […]

Last year I posted about the use of a Joe Celko-style nested set hierarchy representation, for fast hierarchy queries. Here I will describe another approach which is simpler to query, but more wasteful of space. I did not invent this transitive closure approach, I learned of it from several directions:

Celko wrote about it as […]

Last year I gave a talk on Ruby GUI toolkits, and concluded that none of those I looked at were compellingly slick or mature. There is a new player on the field now (thus certainly not mature, but interesting nonetheless): Shoes, from why the lucky stiff.
Shoes creates native applications with a Web feel. It is […]

I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky for years, though I haven’t agreed with everything he’s written, and even mocked him a bit. Joel has written at length on his web site and in print about attracting the best developers, and one aspect of that has bothered me:
How do you attract top developers to work […]

This is an oldie-but-goodie: Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” talk from OOPSLA 1998.
It is amazing to me that Guy, whose is something of a legend in language design, and who thinks so clearly about what makes a good language, was also key in designing Java. Java has been extremely slow to grow in the sense […]