Software, Business, and Life
May 03 2011
Some years ago, the Java IDE marketplace looked quite different than it does today. VisualAge was very popular. Borland’s JBuilder was another top contender. Since then, many of the good ideas from VisualAge ended up in Eclipse, while the JBuilder of that era was replaced by a newer, Eclipse-based JBuilder. Not everything ended up on [...]
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Oct 19 2010
At Strange Loop 2010, Guy Steele gave a wide-ranging, excellent talk in which the key point was: In essence, his notion is to use a divide-and-conquer approach, which he described as “map-reduce in the small” (or some similar phrase). This is analogous to techniques used to partition work in large distributed systems, but inside a [...]
Mar 13 2010
Emboldened a talk that Ryan Senior gave at the St. Louis Lambda Lounge (now available as a video), I grabbed the most popular two Emacs versions for Mac OSX: Aquamacs GNU Emacs 23.1 and set up each on my Macbook Pro (10.6.2). For each Emacs, I also set up SLIME, Swank, and Clojure. If that [...]
Mar 03 2010
Here is the story of a substantial chunk of my professional life over the last five years. I didn’t tell this story in real time (for various good reasons), though I have mentioned bits of it in various talks. In 2004, I co-founded a vertical market Software as a Service firm, Mobile Workforce Management (MWM). [...]
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Oct 20 2008
A while back I was discussing the future of programming languages with a colleague, and we agreed that for all its foibles, JavaScript will continue to enjoy very wide and increasing use in the coming years. I wrote last year about Steve Yegge’s hints that JavaScript is the “next big languages”, see that post for [...]
Oct 10 2008
Yesterday (Oct. 9, 2008), I gave a talk on Git at the St. Louis Java User Group. Rather than a typical “intro” talk, instead I showed a dozen or so common usage scenarios, then answered questions with additional ad-hoc demos. As with some other recent talks, I eschewed PowerPoint in favor of a printed handout. [...]
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