Wise and Otherwise

http://www.acmeburgercompany.com/

Excellent first meal in Salt Lake. Snowing here this morning and colder. Saw them on the way to the hotel and stopped. Boy am I glad I did. Had the Elk Burger with the brandy cream sauce, kinda a huge, open face thing. Excellent, ate it all. The suggested creamed spinach wasn’t really my thing–I’m from the south and spinach should be cooked with some kind of pork fat, salt. garlic and maybe vinegar. They brulee the top of the bread pudding which is interesting.

Upscale but relaxed burger place. The chef at the hotel suggested to check out the pizza place across the street from Acme–hopefully will get to fit that in too.

Heading to Salt Lake tomorrow, first time I’ve been there since 1985. Staying at the Hotel Monaco and doing the tourist thing on Thursday. If you’re there look me up or twitter.

FYI: Looks like the DataMapper guys are going to cut a release tonight. MAJOR changes, looking very promising.

Since the alt.net conference was held in Austin and the theme down there is “Keep Austin Weird”, I think it’s only fitting that we rename alt.net to weird.net. Let’s face it, even though the attendees were 95% caucasian, clean shaven, short-haired, 30 something males, the overall theme of the event screamed “we want to be different.”

As soon as I got back, I had to deal with a crashed server and corrupted active-directory, so I really haven’t had much time even reflect on the weekend. Here’s a few thoughts, I jotted at the airport:

-Scott is often intentionally caustic, his way of forcing people to question everything

-nothing about alt.net is divisive (the event ended with everything but a group hug)

-lots of talk about passion and reinvigorating/finding the passion again

-the “superstars” are uncomfortable with the title and more normal that you’d ever expect

-lots of “Wow, I’ve read your blog forever, I can’t believe I’m meeting you”

-when asked how many have blogs, every hand in the room went up

-Microsoft event planners should be required to study ScottGu presentations, he packed more info in a hour and had the audience captivated

-Microsoft MVC framework is heavily influenced by Django, Rails and Merb (yes, ScottGu explicitly mentioned Merb)

-If you don’t own and haven’t read Domain Driven Design by Evan’s at least twice, do it now

-I still don’t know what alt.net actually means

-conferences was about 15% A-list .net bloggers and Microsoft employees and about 85% normal ordinary guys (and 1 woman), plus Martin Fowler and Scott who are pretty much in a league of their own

-lots of constructive disagreement, very conversational format

-I wish Sam Gentile had attended, he’s a big part of the reason I finally adopted TDD and learned Ruby, I understand his reasons but his experience could have really benefitted the other 85% of the attendees

Ok, that’s all I have time for. I’m really going to try and move the blog entries more to actually talking about implementation than these ramblings.

Via a post from Jeremy I came across this post where Chaz is lamenting the fact that he won’t be able to make it to the alt.net conference. His opening really resounded to me:

My biggest fear is that the top 1% of the class is getting together and they will come up with things that will leave the “marginal” developer behind.

To be clear about this what I mean is that there is a tendency to feel as though we are all unworthy to call ourselves developers right now if we are not an Agilest.

I’ve had very similar thoughts and there a couple of thoughts that have been lurking in the back of my mind as I approach this conference.

The first was when I saw Jamie Cansdale’s name on the roster. A friend and I actually did a very unscientific tally (that I can’t find right now) quantifying the responses to the blog entries regarding TestDriven and VS.Express. What was interesting was that the responses were completely polarized. The point was that it clearly indicated a very big division in people’s perception of the situation.

The second thought crystalized when I saw Martin Fowler’s comment: “Why is this stuff alternative?” Martin’s 100% on the money here. It’s not alternative at all, unless you’re in the .net world that is–and then the label alt.net just causes all sorts of issues for some.

But why is .net different? I don’t remember anything like this happening in the Java world–TDD and Spring just seemed to happen (seemingly overnight). Why is there resistance in the .net world? I think that one of the sessions needs to focus on the “how-to” at a basic level. I’m not sure I’m so worried about leaving the “marginal” developer behind, I’m thinking more about how to get the above average and moving on from there.

One of the issues that I’ve personally experienced is where does one start? For the uninitiated there’s a plethora of dependency injection “frameworks” (Spring.net, Castle/Windsor, StructureMap) not to mention the number of xUnit testing “frameworks” and throw in the curve for coding to interfaces and adopting NHibernate and if your head isn’t spinning by now just wait. And until about a week ago you needed to get the latest Castle/Windsor from svn and compile it yourself if you wanted something newer than almost a year and would work with NHibernate 1.2. Then you’re going to have to tear apart Cyahoga to figure out how to add the Castle/Windsor/NHibernate plumbing into your webapp. And we wonder why people are moving en-masse to : “rails myapp”. (But that’s another blog post altogether.)

Note: If you are in this dilemma, the article by Billy mcCafferty on The Code Project isn’t a bad place to start. It’s very NHibernate oriented but gives a good starting point.

The latest round of flamebait/humor blogs denigrating Ruby, Rails, Java, PHP, etc are making the rounds through the blog-web (no links from me). I’ve read a number of these, it’s the comments that I find interesting. When you write an inflammatory post it’s interesting how the comments split at about 40% agreeing, 40% disagreeing and 20% are you should be using something else entirely (either Django or something no one’s ever heard of) and here the link to my website/blog telling about it.

This phenomenon is not unique to techno-geeks. In fact, the tech crowd are pretty much weaklings when it comes to flaming and are absolute pansies at quantifying their arguments. You all need to spend some time on camera, gun and musical instrument sites (guitars and violins are good ones). The amount of time devoted on these sites to investigating the minutiae of comparative detail makes a $100 million double-blind drug test look like child’s play.

The question I have for the techno-crowd is why are there so many options in programing languages? All the languages being bashed lately are turing complete and can accomplish the tasks we ask them to do (I’m referring to the languages here). The question is not why is there a fundamental underlying desire to know that what we use is the best and the other stuff sucks? It’s why are there so many programming languages?

My argument is that it’s the same reason there are so many flavors of ice cream. According to the International Dairy Foods Association ice cream in the U.S. is a $2.4 billion market and the top 5 flavors are: vanilla (26%), chocolate (12.9%), neapolitan (4.8%), strawberry (4.3%) and cookies n’ cream (4.0%). The variety gets even larger buying a guitar or other instruments. My kid plays the violin, many people will say that the violin picks the player and that it’s a matter of finding the one. I’ve heard similar stories from people who really play guitars. Go buy a new digital SLR, how many choices are there? Really want to see some options (and opinions) go buy a gun (yes, I’m in a part of the world where there are supposedly more guns than people and it’s not a big deal), if you are looking at hand-guns, the options are in the hundreds.

Programming is not a one-size fits all model. Some people like chocolate and other vanilla (or Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia). Stop already. Write some code. Spend some time learning how to write better code. Learn another language. Back when people used film in camera’s it was always interesting to see them go to a class and use black & white film for the first time, just seeing the pictures differently caused them to change. Software is not a destination it’s a journey, maybe even a pilgramage where you’re trying to go somewhere better.

I’ve gotten a few e-mail from friends that have read my rant about leaving the ALT.NET crowd and questioned my rational for leaving the .net/Microsoft world.

So both for myself and everyone out there (all 3 of you), there are a few things I need to clarify:

1) The client that I’m doing this for is not the next twitter, facebook or slashdot. They are a half-century old data provider that has 20,000 to 45,000 page hits per day (yes, per day, not second or minute). That’s Monday-Friday business hours and about 2,000 total hits weekly outside that.

2) About 2/3 of those hits are expensive ones–real searches against the clients data. After doing this for 10 years, I can tell you the database matters infinitely more than the web layer for raw performance. I’m including the sql generated by the web/app layer as part of the database performance.

3) The client is already heterogeneous in there server technology. Linux (postgesql + postgis + mapserver), Solaris (zfs) and Windows all invade their server room.

4) It has nothing to do with leaving the Microsoft camp. I’ve long been language/operating system/database agnostic. If it gets the job done and works for you, use it. This is really about the client reaching a pain-point and needing to do a major refactoring/consolidation. There’s 6 databases, under 4 different database products and 4 different websites under 3 different platforms (java, vb6 and .net). Some of these are getting very long in the tooth and one is even running on DOS.

I’ll probably spend the next blog post talking about the database consolidation because it’s what really started most all of this anyway.

This is to remind me that when I get the

No such file to load — rubygems (LoadError)

Message in eclipse and Aptana’s RadRails that I need to define the ruby interpreter in preferences.

Thanks to Jimmy’z blog entry for pointing me in the right direction.

Seriously? Sahil Malik is a smart guy but trying to defend SharePoint against Jeffrey’s comments had me actually say WTF out-lout. You know why I gave up on SharePoint for a couple of my clients? Because none of us could figure out the licensing. SharePoint seems to be good for a plain install out of the box but past that was just a nightmare. Now my last experience was over a year ago and maybe things have changed but looking at Microsoft’s website there are at least 3 editions (Standard, Enterprise and Internet) and then there’s search options on top of that and forms server. It takes a spreadsheet to handle all the differences between them. And if you want to buy any of it you need Open or Select Licensing–while I’m in a heavily pro-Microsoft part of the world the number of people that do Open Licensing are few and far between. My clients would rather meet with the IRS than sit down with Microsoft to discuss any form of licensing alternatives outside of just buying it (period, end of discussion).

Hi, my name is Paul and I’m addicted to Telerik’s web controls. I also have a 17″ MacBook Pro that runs bootcamp and Vista–I can’t remember the last time I booted OS X–but it’s really a dependency on Outlook, but that’s a whole different blog entry.

I signed up the the ALT.NET Conference and immediately began to have second thoughts. That same day I converted a clients SQL Server database to Postgresql. Two things came to mind: 1) lightning didn’t come down and strike me for such an act of heresy; and 2) it works, quite well, and the client can pay me to do more stuff for them instead of the $40k in license fees. This is where I started questioning the whole order of the universe. I started wondering, if all the alt.net folks are singing the praises of Ruby and Rails, why don’t they just use Ruby and Rails? About the only thing that I saw from reading people’s blogs is that they have too much legacy stuff in other languages, there’s rumors about deployment issues and ActiveRecord has issues. (Scott has an excellent post where almost every gripe about Ruby is brought up).

That nagging feeling that something is just not right just gets worse. I’m in the middle of heavily refactoring an older client web app, adding unit tests, IOC, ORM that isn’t 8 years old, interfaces, etc. It’s been going pretty well but something for the last couple of months has really been nagging at me–why is this getting so complicated? 90% of this app’s code was in it’s search engine (that’s effectively what it is) but I’m getting more and more and more code in the presentation layers and the amount of code-behind is starting to give off a real stench. And there’s this constant feeling that it should be simpler.

In the back of my mind I keep thinking about Ruby. The fantasies about Ruby just wouldn’t go away. It was like 4-5 years ago that I last looked at Ruby. Thought it was interesting, Rails was just beginning, wasn’t really sure what the fuss was about. Just the thought of looking at Ruby again was kinda like thinking about cheating on your wife–it’s a freaking scripting language, nobody writes real software with a scripting language, I’m a c++, java, c# programmer and we all know the world is statically typed, type ambiguities are just downright deviant behavior.

The pressure doesn’t seem to let up any, the egomaniacs that write the blogs I read (not that I’ve ever met a single one of them, and I’ve listed many of the offenders in my blog-roll) keep writing about Ruby–it’s also not just an alt.net things the java world is infatuated too. So I succumb, everyone’s doing it. It’s just a quick download, add the Aptana plug-in to eclipse and pick-up Agile Web Development with Rails.

What happened? Well lets just say that I’m really debating if I’m going to pay that renewal next month for my Telerik subscription and I’ve got to do some soul searching and decide if I’m going to go to the ALT.NET conference or just skip it and go to RubyConf in November.

there was the vauge and meandering ramblings of an overly analytical mind.