A couple of days ago, a buddy of mine, Scott Hanselman, wrote a nice little intro to the "dynamic" type in C# 4.0. In particular, I like (though don't necessarily 100% agree with) his one-sentence summation of dynamic as "There's no way for you or I to know the type of this now, compiler, so let's hope that the runtime figures it out." It's an interesting characterization, but my disagreement with his characterization is not the point here, at least not of this particular blog entry.

I've been waiting for it for a while, ever since C# 4 was announced, and sure enough, here we go: Scott's blog is the victim of the Static-Typing Fundamentalist, the bearded and grizzled veteran of the Static/Dynamic Code Wars, come out to proclaim the sins of dynamic programming, the evils of those who use(d) it, and why C#/C++/Java was so much better than Visual Basic/Ruby/Python/whatever. Be careful of these creatures. They rival Al-Qaeda in their ferocity and zeal, Fox News in their attention to detail and evidence, and George Bush in their pronouncements of gloom and doom for the future if we don't act now and eliminate this evil.

Allow me to quote (liberally) from Rob's comment on Scott's blog, and comment in turn as we go:

It's such a shame that you promote this stuff. You should've seen the horrific devastation that "Variant" caused in the old VB days. Variant single-handedly create job security for so many people since the late 90's, because of the horrible, horrible, horrible things that developers did with that ridiculous, 12-byte data type!

I just love it when people make comments like "horrific devastation". Nothing like a little hyperbole to liven things up! I mean, it didn't cause exceptions, it didn't make code hard to read, it didn't make it tricky for developers to modify and refactor safely, it leveled cities! burned forests! slaughtered kittens! and even worse, it was 12 bytes in size!

Never mind the fact that Visual Basic developers frequently churned out apps twice, three, five times faster than their C++ cousins did. (I know this—I was one of those C++ developers, and routinely mocked the VB guys across the hall for their crappy language and code.... until they built an app in a few days that I tried to build at home in C++ and gave up after two weeks. And all the damn thing did was basic dialogs-and-data kinds of stuff, too.)

This weak-typing with late-binding is just such a bad idea. I know you'll say "But wait, these are powerful tools that skilled developers can leverage!" - and maybe so, but 98% of the people that truly use these sorts of techniques out in the real world, are unskilled developers making a mess of software all across this great land, because the compiler is so forgiving.

Ah, the "All Developers (Except Me) Are Idiots" argument. I love this one—the hubris involved here is just too precious for words. I have no doubt that the author of this post, being (of course) the classically-trained object-oriented developer and therefore too smart/disciplined/experienced/whatever to fall into such a ridiculous temptation as to use dynamic typing, would never use this feature except in the Most Dire of Emergencies, but his fellow programmers, all of them being much less disciplined/smart/trained/whatever than he is, will fall for the temptation and write code that levels cities! burns forests! kills kittens! and worse, uses 12 bytes! (Oh, wait, it's only 3 bytes, because dynamic is just a placeholder for an object reference, and all object references are 3 bytes in the CLR. Or at least they used to be—I admit, I haven't checked in CLR 4.) Those poor souls, they won't have any hope! There they'll be, staring at Visual Studio, wanting desperately to do the Right Thing, and that evil little programmer devil on their shoulder (probably wearing a T-shirt that says, "P3rl is l33t" or something equally blasphemous) will whisper, "You know, if you just make it a dynamic, you can get the compiler to shut up and you can go home early...."

Oh, right—sorry, I forgot. That devil will whisper, "You know, if you write this code in Visual Basic .NET, you can make the entire codebase Option Strict Off and Option Explicit Off, make the compiler shut up and you can go home early...." Hell, they've been whispering that bit of subversion since 2001. And ye Gods! The leveled cities! burned forests! cute little kitten bodies! all over the place! It's fortunate that we C# developers have kept all those Visual Basic developers on the straight-and-narrow path of true salvation static typing.

This is a huge step backwards for C#, in my opinion - and creates the same scenario VB always did - where it is so forgiving, that it allows developers to write horrible code and you won't so much as see a compiler warning!! I've always tauted that C# was better, simply because it gave the developer "tough love", and forced him/her to be better coder and to "make good choices"!

Ah, yes, the C# compiler and its "tough love". The "prefer compile errors over runtime errors" argument, vis-a-vis Scott Meyers' "Effective C++" circa 1994 or so. It's vastly preferable to see errors early, before the big demo in front of the VP/President/potential customer. (Anybody who disagrees with this obviously hasn't had a demo fail in front of a VP/President/potential customer.) How fortunate that the C# compiler catches all these ugly errors at compile-time, like

   1: static void DoSomething()

   2: {

   3:     List<object> intList = new List<object>();

   4:     intList.Add(5);

   5:     string s = (string) intList[0];

   6:     Console.WriteLine(s);

   7: }

... because boy, that would be embarrassing if it didn't. I mean, can you imagine the horror other disciplined/smart/experienced developers would feel if a lenient compiler actually allowed code like this:

   1: class Point

   2: {

   3:     internal int x;

   4:     internal int y;

   5:     public Point(int x, int y)

   6:     {

   7:         x = x;

   8:         y = y;

   9:     }

  10: }

or this:

   1: class Point

   2: {

   3:     internal int x;

   4:     internal int y;

   5:     public Point(int x, int y)

   6:     {

   7:         this.x = x;

   8:         this.y = y;

   9:     }

  10:     public override string ToString()

  11:     {

  12:         return String.Format("({0},{1})", x, y);

  13:     }

  14: }

  15: static void DoSomething()

  16: {

  17:     Point pt = new Point(12, 12);

  18:     pt.GetType()

  19:         .GetField("x", BindingFlags.Instance | 

  20:             BindingFlags.NonPublic)

  21:         .SetValue(pt, 24);

  22:     Console.WriteLine(pt);

  23: }

to compile? Cities! Forests! Kittens! Thank God C# isn't that kind of lustfully promiscuous... I mean, "lenient"... compiler!

(Now if only we could tout blog comment engines with spellcheck....)

Specific to this blog post, if you are doing somewhere where you can't even quantify what the data type that is coming back? Guess waht, you've got yourself a bad design.

Wow. There's just no arguing with that one. I mean, knowing the actual type on which the method is being dispatched is such a huge part of the C# development experience:

   1: static void DoSomething()

   2: {

   3:     List<Point> ptList = new List<Point>();

   4:     ptList.Add(new Point(12, 12));

   5:     object o = ptList[0];

   6:     Console.WriteLine(o.ToString());

   7: }

Gah. Just the thought of not knowing the concrete type on which the method is being dispatched gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Just because the framework allows you use weak-typing and late-binding, doesn't mean you should - nor should you endorse it's use, in my opinion.

Somebody better tell all those users of NHibernate, NUnit, Spring.NET, MEF and all those other Reflection-based tools... including WinForms, ASP.NET, WPF, Workflow and WCF, come to think about it... that they're using frameworks that clearly were designed by idiots. (The gall of those people.)

I'm just saying, it's a shame that popular "nerd celebrities" like you (and I mean zero offense by that!) - endorse all this loosey-goosey typing. I say that becuase I've never seen a single case where weak typing or late binding: A) made a design better or B) where it didn't make the component or application worse, because it was a looser design.

I'm so glad you were here to set Scott and me straight, Rob. Because otherwise, we might actually get something done. God forbid.

Little tidbits of thought for those who are still thinking about this one.

• Ola Bini describes the application of the right language at the right level of the stack as a three-layer pyramid.
• Any C# or Java developer who's not writing unit tests to test their code "because the compiler will catch all those errors" and provide "tough love" needs to be fired. Immediately. I cannot conceive of a situation where unit tests can be passed over in favor of static typing in a professionally-responsible development project. (Oh, don't mis-read that, I can see lots of situations where unit tests aren't necessary. But not on code that's going to reach Production.)
• The argument for the degree of static typing in C# or Java is completely indefensible compared to what statically-typed type-inferenced languages like Haskell, F# or Scala provide. And their syntax frequently looks like "let x = [ 1; 2; 3; 4; ]", which isn't all that far off from what a dynamically-typed language looks like, despite very very different things happening under the compiler's hood. Until you, the Statically-Typed Fundamentalist, have written code in a Haskell/ML-derived language, you have no right arguing the merits of static typing. (In fact, that's probably also true if you've never written code in Ruby, Python, or PowerShell, either.)
• There's lots more arguments the Static-Typing Fundamentalist can throw, by the way. I'm disappointed Rob never mentioned performance, for one—that's a classic line of attack, too. Never mind the fact that most of those guys are still looping down and doing other silly micro-optimizations because that's way C++ taught them to do it....
• Oh, and never ever show the Static Typing Fundamentalist an XML document and using something like XPath to extract data from it. They inevitably fall into XML Schema and the "if we just write the schema flexibly enough" and.... The last time I did that.... I still visit his gravesite, all these years later, and it still hurts, losing him that way.
• Java guys argued against dynamic typing for years, too... until they tried Groovy and JRuby and Clojure. Now.... not so much.

Peace out.

Cruising the Web late last night, I ran across "10 things you can do to advance your career as a developer", summarized below:

1. Build a PC
2. Participate in an online forum and help others
3. Man the help desk
4. Perform field service
5. Perform DBA functions
6. Perform all phases of the project lifecycle
7. Recognize and learn the latest technologies
8. Be an independent contractor
9. Lead a project, supervise, or manage
10. Seek additional education

I agreed with some of them, I disagreed with others, and in general felt like they were a little too high-level to be of real use. For example, "Seek additional education" seems entirely too vague: In what? How much? How often? And "Recognize and learn the latest technologies" is something like offering advice to the Olympic fencing silver medalist and saying, "You should have tried harder".

So, in the great spirit of "Not Invented Here", I present my own list; as usual, I welcome comment and argument. And, also as usual, caveats apply, since not everybody will be in precisely the same place and be looking for the same things. In general, though, whether you're looking to kick-start your career or just "kick it up a notch", I believe this list will help, because these ideas have been of help to me at some point or another in my own career.

10: Build a PC.

Yes, even developers have to know about hardware. More importantly, a developer at a small organization or team will find himself in a position where he has to take on some system administrator roles, and sometimes that means grabbing a screwdriver, getting a little dusty and dirty, and swapping hardware around. Having said this, though, once you've done it once or twice, leave it alone—the hardware game is an ever-shifting and ever-changing game (much like software is, surprise surprise), and it's been my experience that most of us only really have the time to pursue one or the other.

By the way, "PC" there is something of a generic term—build a Linux box, build a Windows box, or "build" a Mac OS box (meaning, buy a Mac Pro and trick it out a little—add more memory, add another hard drive, and so on), they all get you comfortable with snapping parts together, and discovering just how ridiculously simple the whole thing really is.

And for the record, once you've done it, go ahead and go back to buying pre-built systems or laptops—I've never found building a PC to be any cheaper than buying one pre-built. Particularly for PC systems, I prefer to use smaller local vendors where I can customize and trick out the box. If you're a Mac, that's not really an option unless you're into the "Hackintosh" thing, which is quite possibly the logical equivalent to "Build a PC". Having never done it myself, though, I can't say how useful that is as an educational action.

9: Pick a destination

Do you want to run a team of your own? Become an independent contractor? Teach programming classes? Speak at conferences? Move up into higher management and get out of the programming game altogether? Everybody's got a different idea of what they consider to be the "ideal" career, but it's amazing how many people don't really think about what they want their career path to be.

A wise man once said, "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." I disagree: The journey of a thousand miles begins with the damn map. You have to know where you want to go, and a rough idea of how to get there, before you can really start with that single step. Otherwise, you're just wandering, which in itself isn't a bad thing, but isn't going to get you to a destination except by random chance. (Sometimes that's not a bad result, but at least then you're openly admitting that you're leaving your career in the hands of chance. If you're OK with that, skip to the next item. If you're not, read on.)

Lay out explicitly (as in, write it down someplace) what kind of job you're wanting to grow into, and then lay out a couple of scenarios that move you closer towards that goal. Can you grow within the company you're in? (Have others been able to?) Do you need to quit and strike out on your own? Do you want to lead a team of your own? (Are there new projects coming in to the company that you could put yourself forward as a potential tech lead?) And so on.

Once you've identified the destination, now you can start thinking about steps to get there.

If you want to become a speaker, put your name forward to give some presentations at the local technology user group, or volunteer to hold a "brown bag" session at the company. Sign up with Toastmasters to hone your speaking technique. Watch other speakers give technical talks, and see what they do that you don't, and vice versa.

If you want to be a tech lead, start by quietly assisting other members of the team get their work done. Help them debug thorny problems. Answer questions they have. Offer yourself up as a resource for dealing with hard problems.

If you want to slowly move up the management chain, look to get into the project management side of things. Offer to be a point of contact for the users. Learn the business better. Sit down next to one of your users and watch their interaction with the existing software, and try to see the system from their point of view.

And so on.

8: Be a bell curve

Frequently, at conferences, attendees ask me how I got to know so much on so many things. In some ways, I'm reminded of the story of a world-famous concert pianist giving a concert at Carnegie Hall—when a gushing fan said, "I'd give my life to be able to play like that", the pianist responded quietly, "I did". But as much as I'd like to leave you with the impression that I've dedicated my entire life to knowing everything I could about this industry, that would be something of a lie. The truth is, I don't know anywhere near as much as I'd like, and I'm always poking my head into new areas. Thank God for my ADD, that's all I can say on that one.

For the rest of you, though, that's not feasible, and not really practical, particularly since I have an advantage that the "working" programmer doesn't—I have set aside weeks or months in which to do nothing more than study a new technology or language.

Back in the early days of my career, though, when I was holding down the 9-to-5, I was a Windows/C++ programmer. I was working with the Borland C++ compiler and its associated framework, the ObjectWindows Library (OWL), extending and maintaining applications written in it. One contracting client wanted me to work with Microsoft MFC instead of OWL. Another one was storing data into a relational database using ODBC. And so on. Slowly, over time, I built up a "bell curve"-looking collection of skills that sort of "hovered" around the central position of C++/Windows.

Then, one day, a buddy of mine mentioned the team on which he was a project manager was looking for new blood. They were doing web applications, something with which I had zero experience—this was completely outside of my bell curve. HTML, HTTP, Cold Fusion, NetDynamics (an early Java app server), this was way out of my range, though at least NetDynamics was a little similar, since it was basically a server-side application framework, and I had some experience with app frameworks from my C++ days. So, resting on my C++ experience, I started flirting with Java, and so on.

Before long, my "bell curve" had been readjusted to have Java more or less at its center, and I found that experience in C++ still worked out here—what I knew about ODBC turned out to be incredibly useful in understanding JDBC, what I knew about DLLs from Windows turned out to be helpful in understanding Java's dynamic loading model, and of course syntactically Java looked a lot like C++ even though it behaved a little bit differently under the hood. (One article author suggested that Java was closer to Smalltalk than C++, and that prompted me to briefly flirt with Smalltalk before I concluded said author was out of his frakking mind.)

All of this happened over roughly a three-year period, by the way.

The point here is that you won't be able to assimilate the entire industry in a single sitting, so pick something that's relatively close to what you already know, and use your experience as a springboard to learn something that's new, yet possibly-if-not-probably useful to your current job. You don't have to be a deep expert in it, and the further away it is from what you do, the less you really need to know about it (hence the bell curve metaphor), but you're still exposing yourself to new ideas and new concepts and new tools/technologies that still could be applicable to what you do on a daily basis. Over time the "center" of your bell curve may drift away from what you've done to include new things, and that's OK.

7: Learn one new thing every year

In the last tip, I told you to branch out slowly from what you know. In this tip, I'm telling you to go throw a dart at something entirely unfamiliar to you and learn it. Yes, I realize this sounds contradictory. It's because those who stick to only what they know end up missing the radical shifts of direction that the industry hits every half-decade or so until it's mainstream and commonplace and "everybody's doing it".

In their amazing book "The Pragmatic Programmer", Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt suggest that you learn one new programming language every year. I'm going to amend that somewhat—not because there aren't enough languages in the world to keep you on that pace for the rest of your life—far from it, if that's what you want, go learn Ruby, F#, Scala, Groovy, Clojure, Icon, Io, Erlang, Haskell and Smalltalk, then come back to me for the list for 2020—but because languages aren't the only thing that we as developers need to explore. There's a lot of movement going on in areas beyond languages, and you don't want to be the last kid on the block to know they're happening.

Consider this list: object databases (db4o) and/or the "NoSQL" movement (MongoDB). Dependency injection and composable architectures (Spring, MEF). A dynamic language (Ruby, Python, ECMAScript). A functional language (F#, Scala, Haskell). A Lisp (Common Lisp, Clojure, Scheme, Nu). A mobile platform (iPhone, Android). "Space"-based architecture (Gigaspaces, Terracotta). Rich UI platforms (Flash/Flex, Silverlight). Browser enhancements (AJAX, jQuery, HTML 5) and how they're different from the rich UI platforms. And this is without adding any of the "obvious" stuff, like Cloud, to the list.

(I'm not convinced Cloud is something worth learning this year, anyway.)

You get through that list, you're operating outside of your comfort zone, and chances are, your boss' comfort zone, which puts you into the enviable position of being somebody who can advise him around those technologies. DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN YOU MUST KNOW THEM DEEPLY. Just having a passing familiarity with them can be enough. DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN YOU SHOULD PROPOSE USING THEM ON THE NEXT PROJECT. In fact, sometimes the most compelling evidence that you really know where and when they should be used is when you suggest stealing ideas from the thing, rather than trying to force-fit the thing onto the project as a whole.

6: Practice, practice, practice

Speaking of the concert pianist, somebody once asked him how to get to Carnegie Hall. HIs answer: "Practice, my boy, practice."

The same is true here. You're not going to get to be a better developer without practice. Volunteer some time—even if it's just an hour a week—on an open-source project, or start one of your own. Heck, it doesn't even have to be an "open source" project—just create some requirements of your own, solve a problem that a family member is having, or rewrite the project you're on as an interesting side-project. Do the Nike thing and "Just do it". Write some Scala code. Write some F# code. Once you're past "hello world", write the Scala code to use db4o as a persistent storage. Wire it up behind Tapestry. Or write straight servlets in Scala. And so on.

5: Turn off the TV

Speaking of marketing slogans, if you're like most Americans, surveys have shown that you watch about four hours of TV a day, or 28 hours of TV a week. In that same amount of time (28 hours over 1 week), you could read the entire set of poems by Maya Angelou, one F. Scott Fitzgerald novel, all poems by T.S.Eliot, 2 plays by Thornton Wilder, or all 150 Psalms of the Bible. An average reader, reading just one hour a day, can finish an "average-sized" book (let's assume about the size of a novel) in a week, which translates to 52 books a year.

Let's assume a technical book is going to take slightly longer, since it's a bit deeper in concept and requires you to spend some time experimenting and typing in code; let's assume that reading and going through the exercises of an average technical book will require 4 weeks (a month) instead of just one week. That's 12 new tools/languages/frameworks/ideas you'd be learning per year.

All because you stopped watching David Caruso turn to the camera, whip his sunglasses off and say something stupid. (I guess it's not his fault; CSI:Miami is a crap show. The other two are actually not bad, but Miami just makes me retch.)

After all, when's the last time that David Caruso or the rest of that show did anything that was even remotely realistic from a computer perspective? (I always laugh out loud every time they run a database search against some national database on a completely non-indexable criteria—like a partial license plate number—and it comes back in seconds. What the hell database are THEY using? I want it!) Soon as you hear The Who break into that riff, flip off the TV (or set it to mute) and pick up the book on the nightstand and boost your career. (And hopefully sink Caruso's.)

Or, if you just can't give up your weekly dose of Caruso, then put the book in the bathroom. Think about it—how much time do you spend in there a week?

And this gets even better when you get a Kindle or other e-reader that accepts PDFs, or the book you're interested in is natively supported in the e-readers' format. Now you have it with you for lunch, waiting at dinner for your food to arrive, or while you're sitting guard on your 10-year-old so he doesn't sneak out of his room after his bedtime to play more XBox.

4: Have a life

Speaking of XBox, don't slave your life to work. Pursue other things. Scientists have repeatedly discovered that exercise helps keep the mind in shape, so take a couple of hours a week (buh-bye, American Idol) and go get some exercise. Pick up a new sport you've never played before, or just go work out at the gym. (This year I'm doing Hopkido and fencing.) Read some nontechnical books. (I recommend anything by Malcolm Gladwell as a starting point.) Spend time with your family, if you have one—mine spends at least six or seven hours a week playing "family games" like Settlers of Catan, Dominion, To Court The King, Munchkin, and other non-traditional games, usually over lunch or dinner. I also belong to an informal "Game Night club" in Redmond consisting of several Microsoft employees and their families, as well as outsiders. And so on. Heck, go to a local bar and watch the game, and you'll meet some really interesting people. And some boring people, too, but you don't have to talk to them during the next game if you don't want.

This isn't just about maintaining a healthy work-life balance—it's also about having interests that other people can latch on to, qualities that will make you more "human" and more interesting as a person, and make you more attractive and "connectable" and stand out better in their mind when they hear that somebody they know is looking for a software developer. This will also help you connect better with your users, because like it or not, they do not get your puns involving Klingon. (Besides, the geek stereotype is SO 90's, and it's time we let the world know that.)

Besides, you never know when having some depth in other areas—philosophy, music, art, physics, sports, whatever—will help you create an analogy that will explain some thorny computer science concept to a non-technical person and get past a communication roadblock.

3: Practice on a cadaver

Long before they scrub up for their first surgery on a human, medical students practice on dead bodies. It's grisly, it's not something we really want to think about, but when you're the one going under the general anesthesia, would you rather see the surgeon flipping through the "How-To" manual, "just to refresh himself"?

Diagnosing and debugging a software system can be a hugely puzzling trial, largely because there are so many possible "moving parts" that are creating the problem. Compound that with certain bugs that only appear when multiple users are interacting at the same time, and you've got a recipe for disaster when a production bug suddenly threatens to jeopardize the company's online revenue stream. Do you really want to be sitting in the production center, flipping through "How-To"'s and FAQs online while your boss looks on and your CEO is counting every minute by the thousands of dollars?

Take a tip from the med student: long before the thing goes into production, introduce a bug, deploy the code into a virtual machine, then hand it over to a buddy and let him try to track it down. Have him do the same for you. Or if you can't find a buddy to help you, do it to yourself (but try not to cheat or let your knowledge of where the bug is color your reactions). How do you know the bug is there? Once you know it's there, how do you determine what kind of bug it is? Where do you start looking for it? How would you track it down without attaching a debugger or otherwise disrupting the system's operations? (Remember, we can't always just attach an IDE and step through the code on a production server.) How do you patch the running system? And so on.

Remember, you can either learn these things under controlled circumstances, learn them while you're in the "hot seat", so to speak, or not learn them at all and see how long the company keeps you around.

2: Administer the system

Take off your developer hat for a while—a week, a month, a quarter, whatever—and be one of those thankless folks who have to keep the system running. Wear the pager that goes off at 3AM when a server goes down. Stay all night doing one of those "server upgrades" that have to be done in the middle of the night because the system can't be upgraded while users are using it. Answer the phones or chat requests of those hapless users who can't figure out why they can't find the record they just entered into the system, and after a half-hour of thinking it must be a bug, ask them if they remembered to check the "Save this record" checkbox on the UI (which had to be there because the developers were told it had to be there) before submitting the form. Try adding a user. Try removing a user. Try changing the user's password. Learn what a real joy having seven different properties/XML/configuration files scattered all over the system really is.

Once you've done that, particularly on a system that you built and tossed over the fence into production and thought that was the end of it, you'll understand just why it's so important to keep the system administrators in mind when you're building a system for production. And why it's critical to be able to have a system that tells you when it's down, instead of having to go hunting up the answer when a VP tells you it is (usually because he's just gotten an outage message from a customer or client).

1: Cultivate a peer group

Yes, you can join an online forum, ask questions, answer questions, and learn that way, but that's a poor substitute for physical human contact once in a while. Like it or not, various sociological and psychological studies confirm that a "connection" is really still best made when eyeballs meet flesh. (The "disassociative" nature of email is what makes it so easy to be rude or flamboyant or downright violent in email when we would never say such things in person.) Go to conferences, join a user group, even start one of your own if you can't find one. Yes, the online avenues are still open to you—read blogs, join mailing lists or newsgroups—but don't lose sight of human-to-human contact.

While we're at it, don't create a peer group of people that all look to you for answers—as flattering as that feels, and as much as we do learn by providing answers, frequently we rise (or fall) to the level of our peers—have at least one peer group that's overwhelmingly smarter than you, and as scary as it might be, venture to offer an answer or two to that group when a question comes up. You don't have to be right—in fact, it's often vastly more educational to be wrong. Just maintain an attitude that says "I have no ego wrapped up in being right or wrong", and take the entire experience as a learning opportunity.

I'm excited to say that TechEd has accepted my pre-conference proposal, Multiparadigmatic C#, where the abstract reads:

C# has grown from “just” an object-oriented language into a language that is capable of expressing several different paradigms of software development: object-oriented, functional, and dynamic. In this session, developers will learn how to approach programming in C# to use each of these approaches, and when.

If you're interested in seeing C# used in a variety of different ways, come on out.

And if you're not going to TechEd.... why not? It's in New Orleans, folks!

Here we go again—another year, another set of predictions revisited and offered up for the next 12 months. And maybe, if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll take that shot I thought about last year and try predicting for the decade. Without further ado, I'll go back and revisit, unedited, my predictions for 2009 ("THEN"), and pontificate on those subjects for 2010 before adding any new material/topics. Just for convenience, here's a link back to last years' predictions.

Last year's predictions went something like this (complete with basketball-scoring):

• THEN: "Cloud" will become the next "ESB" or "SOA", in that it will be something that everybody will talk about, but few will understand and even fewer will do anything with. (Considering the widespread disparity in the definition of the term, this seems like a no-brainer.) NOW: Oh, yeah. Straight up. I get two points for this one. Does anyone have a working definition of "cloud" that applies to all of the major vendors' implementations? Ted, 2; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in Scala will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that Scala is too hard to learn. NOW: Two points for this one, too. Not a hard one, mind you, but one of those "pass-and-shoot" jumpers from twelve feet out. James Strachan even tweeted about this earlier today, pointing out this comparison. As more Java developers who think of themselves as smart people try to pick up Scala and fail, the numbers of sour grapes responses like "Scala's too complex, and who needs that functional stuff anyway?" will continue to rise in 2010. Ted, 4; Wrongness, 0.
• THEN: Interest in F# will continue to rise, as will the number of detractors who point out that F# is too hard to learn. (Hey, the two really are cousins, and the fortunes of one will serve as a pretty good indication of the fortunes of the other, and both really seem to be on the same arc right now.) NOW: Interestingly enough, I haven't heard as many F# detractors as Scala detractors, possibly because I think F# hasn't really reached the masses of .NET developers the way that Scala has managed to find its way in front of Java developers. I think that'll change mighty quickly in 2010, though, once VS 2010 hits the streets. Ted, 4; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Interest in all kinds of functional languages will continue to rise, and more than one person will take a hint from Bob "crazybob" Lee and liken functional programming to AOP, for good and for ill. People who took classes on Haskell in college will find themselves reaching for their old college textbooks again. NOW: Yep, I'm claiming two points on this one, if only because a bunch of Haskell books shipped this year, and they'll be the last to do so for about five years after this. (By the way, does anybody still remember aspects?) But I'm going the opposite way with this one now; yes, there's Haskell, and yes, there's Erlang, and yes, there's a lot of other functional languages out there, but who cares? They're hard to learn, they don't always translate well to other languages, and developers want languages that work on the platform they use on a daily basis, and that means F# and Scala or Clojure, or its simply not an option. Ted 6; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The iPhone is going to be hailed as "the enterprise development platform of the future", and companies will be rolling out apps to it. Look for Quicken iPhone edition, PowerPoint and/or Keynote iPhone edition, along with connectors to hook the iPhone up to a presentation device, and (I'll bet) a World of Warcraft iPhone client (legit or otherwise). iPhone is the new hotness in the mobile space, and people will flock to it madly. NOW: Two more points, but let's be honest—this was a fast-break layup, no work required on my part. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Oslo CTP will come out, and it will bear only a superficial resemblance to the one that came out in October at PDC. Betting on Oslo right now is a fools' bet, not because of any inherent weakness in the technology, but just because it's way too early in the cycle to be thinking about for anything vaguely resembling production code. NOW: If you've worked at all with Oslo, you might argue with me, but I'm still taking my two points. The two CTPs were pretty different in a number of ways. Ted 10; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The IronPython and IronRuby teams will find some serious versioning issues as they try to manage the DLR versioning story between themselves and the CLR as a whole. An initial hack will result, which will be codified into a standard practice when .NET 4.0 ships. Then the next release of IPy or IRb will have to try and slip around its restrictions in 2010/2011. By 2012, IPy and IRb will have to be shipping as part of Visual Studio just to put the releases back into lockstep with one another (and the rest of the .NET universe). NOW: Pressure is still building. Let's see what happens by the time VS 2010 ships, and then see what the IPy/IRb teams start to do to adjust to the versioning issues that arise. Ted 8; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: The death of JSR-277 will spark an uprising among the two leading groups hoping to foist it off on the Java community--OSGi and Maven--while the rest of the Java world will breathe a huge sigh of relief and look to see what "modularity" means in Java 7. Some of the alpha geeks in Java will start using--if not building--JDK 7 builds just to get a heads-up on its impact, and be quietly surprised and, I dare say, perhaps even pleased. NOW: Ah, Ted, you really should never underestimate the community's willingness to take a bad idea, strip all the goodness out of it, and then cycle it back into the mix as something completely different yet somehow just as dangerous and crazy. I give you Project Jigsaw. Ted 10; Wrongness 2;
• THEN: The invokedynamic JSR will leapfrog in importance to the top of the list. NOW: The invokedynamic JSR begat interest in other languages on the JVM. The interest in other languages on the JVM begat the need to start thinking about how to support them in the Java libraries. The need to start thinking about supporting those languages begat a "Holy sh*t moment" somewhere inside Sun and led them to (re-)propose closures for JDK 7. And in local sports news, Ted notched up two more points on the scoreboard. Ted 12; Wrongness 2.
• THEN: Another Windows 7 CTP will come out, and it will spawn huge media interest that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft promises, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft guarantees, that will eventually be remembered as Microsoft FUD and "promising much, delivering little". Microsoft ain't always at fault for the inflated expectations people have--sometimes, yes, perhaps even a lot of times, but not always. NOW: And then, just when the game started to turn into a runaway, airballs started to fly. The Windows7 release shipped, and contrary to what I expected, the general response to it was pretty warm. Yes, there were a few issues that emerged, but overall the media liked it, the masses liked it, and Microsoft seemed to have dodged a bullet. Ted 12; Wrongness 5.
• THEN: Apple will begin to legally threaten the clone market again, except this time somebody's going to get the DOJ involved. (Yes, this is the iPhone/iTunes prediction from last year, carrying over. I still expect this to happen.) NOW: What clones? The only people trying to clone Macs are those who are building Hackintosh machines, and Apple can't sue them so long as they're using licensed copies of Mac OS X (as far as I know). Which has never stopped them from trying, mind you, and I still think Steve has some part of his brain whispering to him at night, calculating all the hardware sales lost to Hackintosh netbooks out there. But in any event, that's another shot missed. Ted 12; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Alpha-geek developers will start creating their own languages (even if they're obscure or bizarre ones like Shakespeare or Ook#) just to have that listed on their resume as the DSL/custom language buzz continues to build. NOW: I give you Ioke. If I'd extended this to include outdated CPU interpreters, I'd have made that three-pointer from half-court instead of just the top of the key. Ted 14; Wrongness 7.
• THEN: Roy Fielding will officially disown most of the "REST"ful authors and software packages available. Nobody will care--or worse, somebody looking to make a name for themselves will proclaim that Roy "doesn't really understand REST". And they'll be right--Roy doesn't understand what they consider to be REST, and the fact that he created the term will be of no importance anymore. Being "REST"ful will equate to "I did it myself!", complete with expectations of a gold star and a lollipop. NOW: Does anybody in the REST community care what Roy Fielding wrote way back when? I keep seeing "REST"ful systems that seem to have designers who've never heard of Roy, or his thesis. Roy hasn't officially disowned them, but damn if he doesn't seem close to it. Still.... No points. Ted 14; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The Parrot guys will make at least one more minor point release. Nobody will notice or care, except for a few doggedly stubborn Perl hackers. They will find themselves having nightmares of previous lives carrying around OS/2 books and Amiga paraphernalia. Perl 6 will celebrate it's seventh... or is it eighth?... anniversary of being announced, and nobody will notice. NOW: Does anybody still follow Perl 6 development? Has the spec even been written yet? Google on "Perl 6 release", and you get varying reports: "It'll ship 'when it's ready'", "There are no such dates because this isn't a commericially-backed effort", and "Spring 2010". Swish—nothin' but net. Ted 16; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: The debate around "Scrum Certification" will rise to a fever pitch as short-sighted money-tight companies start looking for reasons to cut costs and either buy into agile at a superficial level and watch it fail, or start looking to cut the agilists from their company in order to replace them with cheaper labor. NOW: Agile has become another adjective meaning "best practices", and as such, has essentially lost its meaning. Just ask Scott Bellware. Ted 18; Wrongness 9.
• THEN: Adobe will continue to make Flex and AIR look more like C# and the CLR even as Microsoft tries to make Silverlight look more like Flash and AIR. Web designers will now get to experience the same fun that back-end web developers have enjoyed for near-on a decade, as shops begin to artificially partition themselves up as either "Flash" shops or "Silverlight" shops. NOW: Not sure how to score this one—I haven't seen the explicit partitioning happen yet, but the two environments definitely still seem to be looking to start tromping on each others' turf, particularly when we look at the rapid releases coming from the Silverlight team. Ted 16; Wrongness 11.
• THEN: Gartner will still come knocking, looking to hire me for outrageous sums of money to do nothing but blog and wax prophetic. NOW: Still no job offers. Damn. Ah, well. Ted 16; Wrongness 13.

A close game. Could've gone either way. *shrug* Ah, well. It was silly to try and score it in basketball metaphor, anyway—that's the last time I watch ESPN before writing this.

For 2010, I predict....

• ... I will offer 3- and 4-day training classes on F# and Scala, among other things. OK, that's not fair—yes, I have the materials, I just need to work out locations and times. Contact me if you're interested in a private class, by the way.
• ... I will publish two books, one on F# and one on Scala. OK, OK, another plug. Or, rather, more of a resolution. One will be the "Professional F#" I'm doing for Wiley/Wrox, the other isn't yet finalized. But it'll either be published through a publisher, or self-published, by JavaOne 2010.
• ... DSLs will either "succeed" this year, or begin the short slide into the dustbin of obscure programming ideas. Domain-specific language advocates have to put up some kind of strawman for developers to learn from and poke at, or the whole concept will just fade away. Martin's book will help, if it ships this year, but even that might not be enough to generate interest if it doesn't have some kind of large-scale applicability in it. Patterns and refactoring and enterprise containers all had a huge advantage in that developers could see pretty easily what the problem was they solved; DSLs haven't made that clear yet.
• ... functional languages will start to see a backlash. I hate to say it, but "getting" the functional mindset is hard, and there's precious few resources that are making it easy for mainstream (read: O-O) developers make that adjustment, far fewer than there was during the procedural-to-object shift. If the functional community doesn't want to become mainstream, then mainstream developers will find ways to take functional's most compelling gateway use-case (parallel/concurrent programming) and find a way to "git 'er done" in the traditional O-O approach, probably through software transactional memory, and functional languages like Haskell and Erlang will be relegated to the "What Might Have Been" of computer science history. Not sure what I mean? Try this: walk into a functional language forum, and ask what a monad is. Nobody yet has been able to produce an answer that doesn't involve math theory, or that does involve a practical domain-object-based example. In fact, nobody has really said why (or if) monads are even still useful. Or catamorphisms. Or any of the other dime-store words that the functional community likes to toss around.
• ... Visual Studio 2010 will ship on time, and be one of the buggiest and/or slowest releases in its history. I hate to make this prediction, because I really don't want to be right, but there's just so much happening in the Visual Studio refactoring effort that it makes me incredibly nervous. Widespread adoption of VS2010 will wait until SP1 at the earliest. In fact....
• ... Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 will ship within three months of the final product. Microsoft knows that people wait until SP 1 to think about upgrading, so they'll just plan for an eager SP 1 release, and hope that managers will be too hung over from the New Year (still) to notice that the necessary shakeout time hasn't happened.
• ... Apple will ship a tablet with multi-touch on it, and it will flop horribly. Not sure why I think this, but I just don't think the multi-touch paradigm that Apple has cooked up for the iPhone will carry over to a tablet/laptop device. That won't stop them from shipping it, and it won't stop Apple fan-boiz from buying it, but that's about where the interest will end.
• ... JDK 7 closures will be debated for a few weeks, then become a fait accompli as the Java community shrugs its collective shoulders. Frankly, I think the Java community has exhausted its interest in debating new language features for Java. Recent college grads and open-source groups with an axe to grind will continue to try and make an issue out of this, but I think the overall Java community just... doesn't... care. They just want to see JDK 7 ship someday.
• ... Scala either "pops" in 2010, or begins to fall apart. By "pops", I mean reaches a critical mass of developers interested in using it, enough to convince somebody to create a company around it, a la G2One.
• ... Oracle is going to make a serious "cloud" play, probably by offering an Oracle-hosted version of Azure or AppEngine. Oracle loves the enterprise space too much, and derives too much money from it, to not at least appear to have some kind of offering here. Now that they own Java, they'll marry it up against OpenSolaris, the Oracle database, and throw the whole thing into a series of server centers all over the continent, and call it "Oracle 12c" (c for Cloud, of course) or something.
• ... Spring development will slow to a crawl and start to take a left turn toward cloud ideas. VMWare bought SpringSource for a reason, and I believe it's entirely centered around VMWare's movement into the cloud space—they want to be more than "just" a virtualization tool. Spring + Groovy makes a compelling development stack, particularly if VMWare does some interesting hooks-n-hacks to make Spring a virtualization environment in its own right somehow. But from a practical perspective, any community-driven development against Spring is all but basically dead. The source may be downloadable later, like the VMWare Player code is, but making contributions back? Fuhgeddabowdit.
• ... the explosion of e-book readers brings the Kindle 2009 edition way down to size. The era of the e-book reader is here, and honestly, while I'm glad I have a Kindle, I'm expecting that I'll be dusting it off a shelf in a few years. Kinda like I do with my iPods from a few years ago.
• ... "social networking" becomes the "Web 2.0" of 2010. In other words, using the term will basically identify you as a tech wannabe and clearly out of touch with the bleeding edge.
• ... Facebook becomes a developer platform requirement. I don't pretend to know anything about Facebook—I'm not even on it, which amazes my family to no end—but clearly Facebook is one of those mechanisms by which people reach each other, and before long, it'll start showing up as a developer requirement for companies looking to hire. If you're looking to build out your resume to make yourself attractive to companies in 2010, mad Facebook skillz might not be a bad investment.
• ... Nintendo releases an open SDK for building games for its next-gen DS-based device. With the spectacular success of games on the iPhone, Nintendo clearly must see that they're missing a huge opportunity every day developers can't write games for the Nintendo DS that are easily downloadable to the device for playing. Nintendo is not stupid—if they don't open up the SDK and promote "casual" games like those on the iPhone and those that can now be downloaded to the Zune or the XBox, they risk being marginalized out of existence.

And for the next decade, I predict....

• ... colleges and unversities will begin issuing e-book reader devices to students. It's a helluvalot cheaper than issuing laptops or netbooks, and besides....
• ... netbooks and e-book readers will merge before the decade is out. Let's be honest—if the e-book reader could do email and browse the web, you have almost the perfect paperback-sized mobile device. As for the credit-card sized mobile device....
• ... mobile phones will all but disappear as they turn into what PDAs tried to be. "The iPhone makes calls? Really? You mean Voice-over-IP, right? No, wait, over cell signal? It can do that? Wow, there's really an app for everything, isn't there?"
• ... wireless formats will skyrocket in importance all around the office and home. Combine the iPhone's Bluetooth (or something similar yet lower-power-consuming) with an equally-capable (Bluetooth or otherwise) projector, and suddenly many executives can leave their netbook or laptop at home for a business presentation. Throw in the Whispersync-aware e-book reader/netbook-thing, and now most executives have absolutely zero reason to carry anything but their e-book/netbook and their phone/PDA. The day somebody figures out an easy way to combine Bluetooth with PayPal on the iPhone or Android phone, we will have more or less made pocket change irrelevant. And believe me, that day will happen before the end of the decade.
• ... either Android or Windows Mobile will gain some serious market share against the iPhone the day they figure out how to support an open and unrestricted AppStore-like app acquisition model. Let's be honest, the attraction of iTunes and AppStore is that I can see an "Oh, cool!" app on a buddy's iPhone, and have it on mine less than 30 seconds later. If Android or WinMo can figure out how to offer that same kind of experience without the draconian AppStore policies to go with it, they'll start making up lost ground on iPhone in a hurry.
• ... Apple becomes the DOJ target of the decade. Microsoft was it in the 2000's, and Apple's stunning rising success is going to put it squarely in the sights of monopolist accusations before long. Coupled with the unfortunate health distractions that Steve Jobs has to deal with, Apple's going to get hammered pretty hard by the end of the decade, but it will have mastered enough market share and mindshare to weather it as Microsoft has.
• ... Google becomes the next Microsoft. It won't be anything the founders do, but Google will do "something evil", and it will be loudly and screechingly pointed out by all of Google's corporate opponents, and the star will have fallen.
• ... Microsoft finds its way again. Microsoft, as a company, has lost its way. This is a company that's not used to losing, and like Bill Belichick's Patriots, they will find ways to adapt and adjust to the changed circumstances of their position to find a way to win again. What that'll be, I have no idea, but historically, the last decade notwithstanding, betting against Microsoft has historically been a bad idea. My gut tells me they'll figure something new to get that mojo back.
• ... a politician will make himself or herself famous by standing up to the TSA. The scene will play out like this: during a Congressional hearing on airline security, after some nut/terrorist tries to blow up another plane through nitroglycerine-soaked underwear, the TSA director will suggest all passengers should fly naked in order to preserve safety, the congressman/woman will stare open-mouthed at this suggestion, proclaim, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?" and immediately get a standing ovation and never have to worry about re-election again. Folks, if we want to prevent any chance of loss of life from a terrorist act on an airplane, we have to prevent passengers from getting on them. Otherwise, just accept that it might happen, do a reasonable job of preventing it from happening, and let private insurance start offering flight insurance against the possibility to reassure the paranoid.

See you all next year.

Paul asked me to review this, his first book, and my comment to him was that he had a pretty high bar to match; being of the same "series" as Release It!, Mike Nygard's take on building software ready for production (and, in my repeatedly stated opinion, the most important-to-read book of the decade), Debug It! had some pretty impressive shoes to fill. Paul's comment was pretty predictable: "Thanks for keeping the pressure to a minimum."

My copy arrived in the mail while I was at the NFJS show in Denver this past weekend, and with a certain amount of dread and excitement, I opened the envelope and sat down to read for a few minutes. I managed to get halfway through it before deciding I had to post a review before I get too caught up in my next trip and forget.

Short version

Debug It! is a great resource for anyone looking to learn the science of good debugging. It is entirely language- and platform-agnostic, preferring to focus entirely on the process and mindset of debugging, rather than on edge cases or command-line switches in a tool or language. Overall, the writing is clear and straightforward without being preachy or judgmental, and is liberally annotated with real-life case stories from both the authors' and the Pragmatic Programmers' own history, which keeps the tone lighter and yet still proving the point of the text. Highly recommended for the junior developers on the team; senior developers will likely find some good tidbits in here as well.

Long version

Debug It! is an excellently-written and to-the-point description of the process of not only identifying and fixing defects in software, but also of the attitudes required to keep software from failing. Rather than simply tossing off old maxims or warming them over with new terminology ("You should always verify the parameters to your procedure calls" replaced with "You should always verify the parameters entering a method and ensure the fields follow the invariants established in the specification"), Paul ensures that when making a point, his prose is clear, the rationale carefully explained, and the consequences of not following this advice are clearly spelled out. His advice is pragmatic, and takes into account that developers can't always follow the absolute rules we'd like to—he talks about some of his experiences with "bug priorities" and how users pretty quickly figured out to always set the bug's priority at the highest level in order to get developer attention, for example, and some ways to try and address that all-too-human failing of bug-tracking systems.

It needs to be said, right from the beginning, that Debug It! will not teach you how to use the debugging features of your favorite IDE, however. This is because Paul (deliberately, it seems) takes a platform- and language-agnostic approach to the book—there are no examples of how to set breakpoints in gdb, or how to attach the Visual Studio IDE to a running Windows service, for example. This will likely weed out those readers who are looking for "Google-able" answers to their common debugging problems, and that's a shame, because those are probably the very readers that need to read this book. Having said that, however, I like this agnostic approach, because these ideas and thought processes, the ones that are entirely independent of the language or platform, are exactly the kinds of things that senior developers carry over with them from one platform to the next. Still, the junior developer who picks this book up is going to still need a reference manual or the user manual for their IDE or toolchain, and will need to practice some with both books in hand if they want to maximize the effectiveness of what's in here.

One of the things I like most about this book is that it is liberally adorned with real-life discussions of various scenarios the author team has experienced; the reason I say "author team" here is because although the stories (for the most part) remain unattributed, there are obvious references to "Dave" and "Andy", which I assume pretty obviously refer to Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt, the Pragmatic Programmers and the owners of Pragmatic Bookshelf. Some of the stories are humorous, and some of them probably would be humorous if they didn't strike so close to my own bitterly-remembered experiences. All of them do a good job of reinforcing the point, however, thus rendering the prose more effective in communicating the idea without getting to be too preachy or bombastic.

The book obviously intends to target a junior developer audience, because most senior developers have already intuitively (or experientially) figured out many of the processes described in here. But, quite frankly, I think it would be a shame for senior developers to pass on this one; though the temptation will be to simply toss it aside and say, "I already do all this stuff", senior developers should resist that urge and read it through cover to cover. If nothing else, it'll help reinforce certain ideas, bring some of the intuitive process more to light and allow us to analyze what we do right and what we do wrong, and perhaps most importantly, give us a common backdrop against which we can mentor junior developers in the science of debugging.

One of the chapters I like in particular, "Chapter 7: Pragmatic Zero Tolerance", is particularly good reading for those shops that currently suffer from a deficit of management support for writing good software. In it, Paul talks specifically about some of the triage process about bugs ("When to fix bugs"), the mental approach developers should have to fixing bugs ("The debugging mind-set") and how to get started on creating good software out of bad ("How to dig yourself out of a quality hole"). These are techniques that a senior developer can bring to the team and implement at a grass-roots level, in many cases without management even being aware of what's going on. (It's a sad state of affairs that we sometimes have to work behind management's back to write good-quality code, but I know that some developers out there are in exactly that situation, and simply saying, "Quit and find a new job", although pithy and good for a laugh on a panel, doesn't really offer much in the way of help. Paul doesn't take that route here, and that alone makes this book worth reading.)

Another of the chapters that resonates well with me is the first one in Part III ("Debug Fu"), Chapter 8, entitled "Special Cases", in which he tackles a number of "advanced" debugging topics, such as "Patching Existing Releases" and "Hesenbugs" (Concurrency-related bugs). I won't spoil the punchline for you, but suffice it to say that I wish I'd had that chapter on hand to give out to teammates on a few projects I've worked on in the past.

Overall, this book is going to be a huge win, and I think it's a worthy successor to the Release It! reputation. Development managers and team leads should get a copy for the junior developers on their team as a Christmas gift, but only after the senior developers have read through it as well. (Senior devs, don't despair—at 190 pages, you can rip through this in a single night, and I can almost guarantee that you'll learn a few ideas you can put into practice the next morning to boot.)

Phil Haack wrote a thoughtful, insightful and absolutely correct response to my earlier blog post. But he's still missing the point.

The short version: Phil's right when he says, "Agile is less about managing the complexity of an application itself and more about managing the complexity of building an application." Agile is by far the best approach to take when building complex software.

But that's not where I'm going with this.

As a starting point in the discussion, I'd like to call attention to one of Phil's sidebars: I find it curious (and indicative of the larger point) his earlier comment about "I have to wonder, why is that little school district in western Pennsylvania engaging in custom software development in the first place?" At what point does standing a small Access database up qualify as "custom software development"? And I take huge issue with Phil's comment immediately thereafter: "" That's totally untrue, Phil—you are, in fact, creating custom educational curricula, for your children at home. Not for popular usage, not for commercial use, but clearly you're educating your children at home, because you'd be a pretty crappy parent if you didn't. You also practice an informal form of medicine ("Let me kiss the boo-boo"), psychology ("Now, come on, share the truck"), culinary arts ("Would you like mac and cheese tonight?"), acting ("Aaar! I'm the Tickle Monster!") and a vastly larger array of "professional" skills that any of the "professionals" will do vastly better than you.

In other words, you're not a professional actor/chef/shrink/doctor, you're an amateur one, and you want tools that let you practice your amateur "professions" as you wish, without requiring the skills and trappings (and overhead) of a professional in the same arena.

Consider this, Phil: your child decides it's time to have a puppy. (We all know the kids are the ones who make these choices, not us, right?) So, being the conscientious parent that you are, you decide to build a doghouse for the new puppy to use to sleep outdoors (forgetting, as all parents do, that the puppy will actually end up sleeping in the bed with your child, but that's another discussion for another day). So immediately you head on down to Home Depot, grab some lumber, some nails, maybe a hammer and a screwdriver, some paint, and head on home.

Whoa, there, turbo. Aren't you forgetting a few things? For starters, you need to get the concrete for the foundation, rebar to support the concrete in the event of a bad earthquake, drywall, fire extinguishers, sirens for the emergency exit doors... And of course, you'll need a foreman to coordinate all the work, to make sure the foundation is poured before the carpenters show up to put up the trusses, which in turn has to happen before the drywall can go up...

We in this industry have a jealous and irrational attitude towards the amateur software developer. This was even apparent in the Twitter comments that accompanied the conversation around my blog post: "@tedneward treating the disease would mean... have the client have all their ideas correct from the start" (from @kelps). In other words, "bad client! No biscuit!"?

Why is it that we, IT professionals, consider anything that involves doing something other than simply putting content into an application to be "custom software development"? Why can't end-users create tools of their own to solve their own problems at a scale appropriate to their local problem?

Phil offers a few examples of why end-users creating their own tools is a Bad Idea:

I remember one rescue operation for a company drowning in the complexity of a “simple” Access application they used to run their business. It was simple until they started adding new business processes they needed to track. It was simple until they started emailing copies around and were unsure which was the “master copy”. Not to mention all the data integrity issues and difficulty in changing the monolithic procedural application code.

I also remember helping a teachers union who started off with a simple attendance tracker style app (to use an example Ted mentions) and just scaled it up to an atrociously complex Access database with stranded data and manual processes where they printed excel spreadsheets to paper, then manually entered it into another application.

And you know what?

This is not a bad state of affairs.

Oh, of course, we, the IT professionals, will immediately pounce on all the things wrong with their attempts to extend the once-simple application/solution in ways beyond its capabilities, and we will scoff at their solutions, but you know what? That just speaks to our insecurities, not the effort expended. You think Wolfgang Puck isn't going to throw back his head and roar at my lame attempts at culinary experimentation? You think Frank Lloyd Wright wouldn't cringe in horror at my cobbled-together doghouse? And I'll bet Maya Angelou will be so shocked at the ugliness of my poetry that she'll post it somewhere on the "So You Think You're A Poet" website.

Does that mean I need to abandon my efforts to all of these things?

The agilists' community reaction to my post would seem to imply so. "If you aren't a professional, don't even attempt this?" Really? Is that the message we're preaching these days?

End users have just as much a desire and right to be amateur software developers as we do at being amateur cooks, photographers, poets, construction foremen, and musicians. And what do you do when you want to add an addition to your house instead of just building a doghouse? Or when you want to cook for several hundred people instead of just your family?

You hire a professional, and let them do the project professionally.

The above quote was tossed off by Billy Hollis at the patterns&practices Summit this week in Redmond. I passed the quote out to the Twitter masses, along with my +1, and predictably, the comments started coming in shortly thereafter. Rather than limit the thoughts to the 120 or so characters that Twitter limits us to, I thought this subject deserved some greater expansion.

But before I do, let me try (badly) to paraphrase the lightning talk that Billy gave here, which sets context for the discussion:

• Keeping track of all the stuff Microsoft is releasing is hard work: LINQ, EF, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, Enterprise Library, Azure, Prism, Sparkle, MEF, WCF, WF, WPF, InfoCard, CardSpace, the list goes on and on, and frankly, nobody (and I mean nobody) can track it all.
• Microsoft released all this stuff because they were chasing the "enterprise" part of the developer/business curve, as opposed to the "long tail" part of the curve that they used to chase down. They did this because they believed that this was good business practice—like banks, "enterprises are where the money is". (If you're not familiar with this curve, imagine a graph with a single curve asymptotically reaching for both axes, where Y is the number of developers on the project, and X is the number of projects. What you get is a curve of a few high-developer-population projects on the left, to a large number of projects with just 1 or 2 developers. This right-hand portion of the curve is known as "the long tail" of the software industry.)
• A lot of software written back in the 90's was written by 1 or 2 guys working for just a few months to slam something out and see if it was useful. What chances do those kinds of projects have today? What tools would you use to build them?
• The problem is the complexity of the tools we have available to us today preclude that kind of software development.
• Agile doesn't solve this problem—the agile movement suggests that we have to create story cards, we have to build unit tests, we have to have a continuous integration server, we have to have standup meetings every day, .... In short, particularly among the agile evangelists (by which we really mean zealots), if you aren't doing a full agile process, you are simply failing. (If this is true, how on earth did all those thousands of applications written in FoxPro or Access ever manage to succeed? –-Me) At one point, an agilist said point-blank, "If you don't do agile, what happens when your project reaches a thousand users?" As Billy put it, "Think about that for a second: This agile guy is threatening us with success."
• Agile is for managing complexity. What we need is to recognize that there is a place for outright simplicity instead.

By the way, let me say this out loud: if you have not heard Billy Hollis speak, you should. Even if you're a Java or Ruby developer, you should listen to what he has to say. He's been developing software for a long time, has seen a lot of these technology-industry trends come and go, and even if you disagree with him, you need to listen to him.

Let me rephrase Billy's talk this way:

Where is this decade's Access?

It may seem like a snarky and trolling question, but think about it for a moment: for a decade or so, I was brought into project after project that was designed to essentially rebuild/rearchitect the Access database created by one of the department's more tech-savvy employees into something that could scale beyond just the department.

(Actually, in about half of them, the goal wasn't even to scale it up, it was just to put it on the web. It was only in the subsequent meetings and discussions that the issues of scale came up, and if my memory is accurate, I was the one who raised those issues, not the customer. I wonder now, looking back at it, if that was pure gold-plating on my part.)

Others, including many people I care about (Rod Paddock, Markus Eggers, Ken Levy, Cathi Gero, for starters) made a healthy living off of building "line of business" applications in FoxPro, which Microsoft has now officially shut down. For those who did Office applications, Visual Basic for Applications has now been officially deprecated in favor of VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office), a set of libraries that are available for use by any .NET application language, and of course classic Visual Basic itself has been "brought into the fold" by making it a fully-fledged object-oriented language complete with XML literals and LINQ query capabilities.

Which means, if somebody working for a small school district in western Pennsylvania wants to build a simple application for tracking students' attendance (rather than tracking it on paper anymore), what do they do?

Bruce Tate alluded to this in his Beyond Java, based on the realization that the Java space was no better—to bring a college/university student up to speed on all the necessary technologies required of a "productive" Java developer, he calculated at least five or six weeks of training was required. And that's not a bad estimate, and might even be a bit on the shortened side. You can maybe get away with less if they're joining a team which collectively has these skills distributed across the entire team, but if we're talking about a standalone developer who's going to be building software by himself, it's a pretty impressive list. Here's my back-of-the-envelope calculations:

• Week one: Java language. (Nobody ever comes out of college knowing all the Java language they need.)
• Week two: Java virtual machine: threading/concurrency, ClassLoaders, Serialization, RMI, XML parsing, reference types (weak, soft, phantom).
• Week three: Infrastructure: Ant, JUnit, continuous integration, Spring.
• Week four: Data access: JDBC, Hibernate. (Yes, I think you need a full week on Hibernate to be able to use it effectively.)
• Week five: Web: HTTP, HTML, servlets, filters, servlet context and listeners, JSP, model-view-controller, and probably some Ajax to boot.

I could go on (seriously! no JMS? no REST? no Web services?), but you get the point. And lest the .NET community start feeling complacent, put together a similar list for the standalone .NET developer, and you'll come out to something pretty equivalent. (Just look at the Pluralsight list of courses—name the one course you would give that college kid to bring him up to speed. Stumped? Don't feel bad—I can't, either. And it's not them—pick on any of the training companies.)

Now throw agile into that mix: how does an agile process reduce the complexity load? And the answer, of course, is that it doesn't—it simply tries to muddle through as best it can, by doing all of the things that developers need to be doing: gathering as much feedback from every corner of their world as they can, through tests, customer interaction, and frequent releases. All of which is good. I'm not here to suggest that we should all give up agile and immediately go back to waterfall and Big Design Up Front. Anybody who uses Billy's quote as a sound bite to suggest that is a subversive and a terrorist and should have their arguments refuted with extreme prejudice.

But agile is not going to reduce the technology complexity load, which is the root cause of the problem.

Or, perhaps, let me ask it this way: your 16-year-old wants to build a system to track the cards in his Magic deck. What language do you teach him?

We are in desperate need of simplicity in this industry. Whoever gets that, and gets it right, defines the "Next Big Thing".

Jon Skeet, noted C# MVP, has been asked by his employer to reject his MVP award this year.

I have two reactions:

1. I think it's an awkward situation when an employer hires somebody who is as deeply involved in a technology space as Jon is, then asks them to take actions that will deliberately distance them from that technology space. It strikes me as a waste of Jon's investment into the space, and a poor choice of actions. Why take a champion and hobble them?
2. Jon's actions, by accepting their request, puts him in that class of character that can be best described as "with honor".

Jon, if you by chance are in Redmond during the MVP Summit, you are more than welcome at ChezNeward2010. You may not be an MVP with Microsoft, but you're one to me.

Recently, an email crossed my Inbox from a friend who was concerned about some questionable practices involving my content (as well as a few others'); apparently, I have been listed as an "author" for SysCon, I have a "domain" with them, and that I've been writing for them since 10 January, 2003, including two articles, "Effective Enterprise Java" and "Java/.NET Interoperability".

Given that both of those "articles" are summaries from presentations I've done at conferences past, I'm a touch skeptical. In fact, it feels like those summaries were scraped from conferences I've done in the past, and I certainly don't remember ever giving Sys-Con (or any other conference) the right to reprint my presentation as an article.

Then it turns out that apparently I'm not the only one suffering this problem. Go. Read that article, then come back. I promise, I'll wait.

(Seriously, go read it.)

Wow. Just... wow. If even half of what Aral's story is true (and I'm inclined to believe at least part of it, given that he's done some pretty meticulous documentation of at least his side of the story), then this is beyond outrageous, and squarely into "completely unethical".

Now, I'll be the first to admit, I've not heard back from Sys-Con about any of this, so if I get any sort of response I'll be sure to update this blog post. But...

Calling anyone a "homosexual son of a bitch", "terrorist" or "fag" is so unbelievably offensive it staggers the mind. Normally, I'd be a bit hesitant to just give either party the benefit of the doubt on that one, given just how ludicrous the accusation sounds, but Aral includes screen shots of the articles, which in of itself lends an air of credibility to the accusation—either Aral is the world's worst Turkish translator, or Sys-Con's translation into Turkish is a bit on the "edgy" side, or Sys-Con really did call him that. Which implies that whichever way this goes, doesn't look good for one of the two parties. But even if we leave that to one side....

Sys-Con is playing with fire by collecting my content and claiming me as an author. Sys-Con never contacted me about becoming a part of their "Ulitzer" website. They never asked me for permission to reprint my articles, though, I'll admit, I can't find where the articles actually exist, nor links to the articles, so maybe they didn't, actually, reprint the article, but just link to them... except I can't find the links to the articles or the presentations, either. They never asked me for an updated bio or photo, and in fact, they pretty clearly grabbed both bio, photo and "summaries" from an old location, because that bio lists me as a DevelopMentor instructor (which I haven't been for two years or so), and as living in Sacramento, CA (which I haven't been for about three years or so). Let me be very clear about this: I do not write for Sys-Con Media. I never have. They have never asked permission to reuse any of the content I have produced. I am appalled at being included in such a fashion.

Note that I'm not opposed to being linked to, mind you—if I put material on my blog, I generally expect (and hope) that people will link to it, and I don't demand permission or even notification when it happens. But to claim that I've written material for an entity does mean I expect to at least be asked if it's OK to use my likeness, name, or material. No such request was ever made of me, so far as I can remember or find (through my own email archives, which stretch back to 2001).

And I can say that I've thought about this issue before, from the other side of the story—back when I was editor at TheServerSide.NET, we began a "blogger's program" that would take interesting blog posts from around the Internet and "collect" them in some fashion for TSS.NET readers. Originally, the thought was to simply reproduce the content directly on our site, and I hated that idea, for the same reasons as I dislike it when somebody does it to me. Regardless of the licensing model the blog entries are published under, to me, a publication or media firm owes the author at least the right of refusal, and a chance to be notified when their material is reused. (In the end, we chose to ask authors if we could reproduce their material in the program, and we never (to my knowledge) had an author refuse.) It doesn't take a real rocket scientist's brain to figure out that asking permission is never a bad thing to do if you want to maintain good will with your sources of material.

This is an open and public request to Sys-Con media: either contact me about using my name, likeness and material on your website, or remove it. (I have emailed their editorial and asked them to acknowledge receipt of my request.)

In the meantime, I will be making every effort to make sure that other content-producers I know are aware of Sys-Con's practices, so they can act as they see fit.

If you are a reader, and find this distasteful as well, then I suggest you follow some of the suggestions mentioned in Aral's blog post:

• Tell everyone you know about what Sys-Con is doing (but don't link to them so as not to give them Google Juice). If tweeting, leave out the http:// bit so that your URL is not automatically made into a link.
• Sys-Con feeds upon the work of authors and speakers to live. If all authors had their content removed from Sys-Con and Ulitzer, they would not have pages to put ads on. So go through their list of authors and notify the ones you know. If they are unaware that they're listed there, they will most likely want themselves removed. Update: I've created a single list of all Sys-Con's Ulitzer authors. More information and the full list are in this post. The original list of authors is at http://www.ulitzer.com/?q=authors. You can ask for your Ulitzer/Sys-Con author page to be removed by emailing editorial@sys-con.com.
• Contact their advertisers and tell them what you think of their association with Sys-Con.
• If you know any speakers speaking at Sys-Con events, make sure they know the kind of company they are associating themselves with. Do the same with anyone you know who is thinking of attending one of their events. Raise awareness about their events at your place of work.
• Make sure Google knows that Sys-Con/Ulitzer is spamming Google with tons of duplicate content. Report them on Google's spam page for posting duplicate content. According to their terms and conditions, Google should stop indexing Sys-Con/Ulitzer. See this comment for a template you can use when reporting them.
• Make sure Google News knows that they are syndicating libelous articles from Sys-Con. Use the Google News Report an Issue form to report the following articles: http://internetvideo.sys-con.com/node/1017038, http://internetvideo.sys-con.com/node/1028923, http://www.sys-con.com/node/1035252, http://air.ulitzer.com/node/1038383, http://openwebdeveloper.sys-con.com/node/1039556, and http://cloudcomputing.sys-con.com/node/1047589

Meanwhile, I'm going to be talking about this to everybody I know at Microsoft, desperately seeking to find out which department engaged the advertising with Sys-Con, and looking to convince them that they don't need this kind of press or association. Ditto for the contacts (far fewer in number) I have with IBM, and any other Sys-Con advertiser I find.

This post from TechCrunch crossed my attention inbox today, and I find myself quite flummoxed on the subject of how I think I should react.

Assume you have managed, through no overt work on your part (meaning, you didn't explicitly solicit, ask, or otherwise endeavor to obtain), to get ownership of "hundreds of confidential corporate and personal documents" for a company. Assume further that these documents are genuine—there is little to no chance that they could have been forged or fabricated. The documents span a range of sensitivity, from documents that are "somewhat embarrassing to various individuals, but not otherwise interesting", to documents that "show floorplans and security passcodes to get into the Twitter offices", to documents "showing financial projections, product plans and notes from executive strategy meetings". In other words, documents that yes, could create a certain amount of havoc to the corporate entity in question, could embarrass individuals within (and not within) that company, and documents that could lead to a competitive advantage for the entity's competitors.

Now also assume, for the purpose of the discussion, that you are an entity whose business model or raison d'etre is to publish—you are a blogger, a "social networking maven", a media outlet, whatever.

Is it unethical to publish these documents? Is it simply trolling for hits? Is there a "journalistic responsibility" to publish this material?

The people from TechCrunch feel like they have a right/responsibility to publish at least some of the documents, and are unswayed by the arguments in the blog's comments about the morality of such a move, including such comments as "This is an a**hole move" and "there's still an appearance of lapse of ethics here" (and that's just within the first half-dozen comments or so". What is particularly interesting is the response from (someone I assume to be) one of the blog's owners:

lol. if we only posted things that companies gave us permission to post this would be a press release site and none of you would be here. News is stuff someone doesn’t want you to write. The rest is advertising.

This comment disturbs me on several levels—it's only news if it's "stuff someone doesn't want you to write"? That's a pretty shallow and narrowly-defined sense of the term, if you ask me, and it puts periodicals like National Enquirer and Star magazines on the same level as the New York Times and CNN. (Although, and I'll freely admit this, having just come through the Michael Jackson media blitz, sometimes it feels difficult to tell the difference between all four of those.)

At the same time, though, it's clear from our own history that journalism has served the public good by shining a bright light into shady corners that some powers-that-be would prefer left unexposed. The abuses described by Upton Sinclair in the turn-of-the-century factories, the rampant sexual harassment in the military exposed by the Tailhook scandal, and certainly the outright blatantly violent suppression of Civil Rights movement of the 60's in the South were all shining examples of journalism at its finest, showing off dark and ugly parts of the world and—either implicitly or explicitly—demanding society to acknowledge it and either openly accept it or strive to change it (with all three of my examples seeing society choosing the latter).

What is "journalistic responsibility" here?

In our chosen field—that of computer science and software—there is clearly a responsibility for those "in the know" to reveal scenarios where information is being purloined or made available that violates individuals' rights to privacy. It's one thing if I trade my personal sales habits to a grocery store chain in exchange for a percentage off the final sale. That's a choice I'm making, consciously and knowingly. (By this point, if you haven't figured that out, you're just deliberately hiding from the fact.) But for somebody else to disclose my purchasing history without my consent to another party, that's brushing a very ugly moral dark area. And if a company is choosing to take its customers' personal data and make it available for anyone else to use as they see fit—for whatever purpose that third party can imagine—then cheers and kudos to the whistle-blower who brings media attention on that behavior.

But Twitter doesn't have much of my personal data, and they certainly didn't give it away to anybody—it was stolen from them, according to what I've read so far. What's more, I don't really have that much personal data stored with them—certainly no credit cards, birthdates, financial or medical information, or even family notes. What's there is actually pretty tame, as a Twitter customer.

(Twitter employees are a totally different matter. Admittedly. But let's just stick with the Twitter customer data for now.)

So where is the "journalistic responsibility" in publishing this material?

And are bloggers journalists? Should they be held to the same standards as journalists? And if not, then with all these formerly print-only media moving to the Internet and putting more and more of their material online, where do we draw that line? What's the difference between Fareed Zakaria writing a column on Middle East affairs for Newsweek.com on a monthly basis and Joe Sixpack posting a monthly rant on the illegal and illicit activities of his hometown rival's sports team? Is it just the domain name? And if Joe Sixpack decides to say, point blank, "TechCrunch paid for that material, they hired the guy who broke into the Twitter offices and stole it" on his blog, what avenues does TechCrunch have to decry and/or reverse that trend?

For the record, I oppose what TechCrunch is doing except if there is some blatantly legal violation of consumers' privacy. Frankly, if the hacker had approached me with those documents, I'd be working with the FBI to see the guy tossed in jail, because folks, if he did it to them, he could just as easily do it to you.

But this still leaves the deeper question about where bloggers sit in the journalistic continuum, and I admit, I have a lot of mixed feelings on the subject.

Google made the announcement on Tuesday: Chrome OS, a "open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks."

Huh?

I'm sorry, but from a number of perspectives, this move makes no sense to me.

Don't get me wrong—on a number of levels, the operating system needs a little shaking up. Windows7 looks good, granted, Mac OS is a strong contender, and both are clearly popular with the consuming public, but innovation in the operating system seems pretty limited right now, to eye candy graphical window-opening/window-closing effects, different window decorations (title bars and minimize/maximize buttons), and areas along the edges of the screen to store icons. At no point has any of the last three or four OS releases from any of the major vendors—Microsoft, Apple, or the various Linux distros—really introduced anything novel, just infinite variations on a theme. Filesystems are still hierarchical, users still install and manage applications, and so on. In fact, arguably the most interesting development in operating systems has been the iPhone, and most of its innovations center around two things: the two-finger interface, and the complete mental reboot of what user interface looks and acts like.

Seriously, that's the best we can do?

I see a lot of room for improvements in the operating system experience; for starters, let's do away with the "browser" and just call Firefox, IE and Chrome what they're (far too slowly) evolving into: a generic application host. Get that story right—the acquisition of applications onto the device, the updating of those applications when new versions are available, the offline application experience, and so on—and the operating system and the browser will mesh into a seamless whole. But we're not there yet, not by a long ways, and the first competitor to create such an environment will have a huge advantage over its rivals. Arguably Apple got there first with the iPhone and AppStore, and yet the iPhone still needs iTunes running on a computer to make the experience seamless, and iTunes is definitely not what I call a seamless user experience.

(Besides, the iPhone is hamstrung on a number of levels—I would absolutely despise trying to write this blog post on it, for example.)

Despite the clear window of opportunity for an innovative operating system to step in and make some serious waves in the industry, Google producing an OS really doesn't make sense to me, for a number of reasons.

• Challenging your opponent on your opponent's turf is never a good idea. A maxim of battle says that one should only battle on favorable terrain, yet Google's deliberately choosing to "cross the line", as it were, into territory that is clearly foreign to them. They have no expertise in marketing it, selling it, researching it, or developing it, while their competitors in this—Microsoft, Apple being the principal two—have been doing it for decades. Literally. I realize that Google has a number of smart people working for them, but it seems pretty presumptuous and arrogant to think they can get this story better, particularly in any kind of short term.
• This is a difficult problem to tackle. Microsoft's known it for decades, Apple is discovering it all over again, and Linuxers have either wallowed in it as a sign of prowess or just accepted the problem as intractable—it's really hard to get an operating system to recognize the billions of different devices out there. Apple solved it by jealously and zealously chasing anyone who ever tried to run Mac OS on non-Apple hardware. Linux consumers found themselves recompiling kernels or in some cases, having to build device drivers themselves. Microsoft just suffered through it. For a new OS, the only path possible in the beginning is to support the 20% of the devices that 80% of the people use, and hope that nobody else tries a device that isn't on that list and blogs to tell about it. Unfortunately, the chosen target market (consumer netbooks) works against them here in a big way. With developers, it's pretty easy to say, "Sorry, guys, you know how it is, give us a few years, or contribute the patch yourself!"; with consumers, if their BuyMart-bargain-bin web cam doesn't work, it's Google's fault and they'll be up in the acne-spackled BuyMart counter boy's face about it. This will not persuade BuyMart to stock the Chrome-installed netbook for much longer.
• Is this really the company that swore to "do no evil"? Google's announcement is vague on so many levels, it's almost a FUD play, or else they're trying to blatantly cash in on their "geek cred" to convince investors and analysts that they've finally found a new source of revenue to supplement AdWords. (Well, modulo the fact that this new OS will be open-source, which means it's not really a revenue play, but I'm sure they've got that figured out somehow, too.) Seriously, this doesn't make sense: if you're doing an open-source OS, then where is the source? Where is the transparency? Where is my ability to contribute despite my status as a non-Google developer? What part of this project is open-source in any sense of the term?
• Netbooks? I realize that netbooks are the new hotness to a lot of people, a compromise between a phone/PDA and a laptop, and that the price point of the netbook means that for the first time, consumers can get into computing for under $250 (rivalling the price of game consoles) that addresses their fundamental needs—email, web surfing and maybe an application or two—but the timing here is just too late. Google's announcement says that "netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010". Which means that the major competitors (mostly Windows) will have twelve months to convince netbook consumers that Windows (and Windows7, in particular) is the right choice to run the netbook, and Google will be starting from some distance behind the 8-ball. Chrome needs to be available now if they're going to avoid a long and entrenched battle starting from a position of weakness.
• It's a distraction from their strength. Abraham Lincoln is famous for saying. "You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong", but this represents Google's third or fourth effort into a space that really isn't leveraging their core strength (their ability to scale). Even if the money and resources spent on Chrome (and Android, for that matter) have zero effect on the budgeting and resourcing for Google App Engine and other server plays, the message and story that Google presents to the world is now as disjoint and multifaceted (and therefore harder to grasp) as Microsoft's.
• Haven't we seen this before? Wasn't it almost a decade ago when another company announced a plan to unify the browser and the desktop? In that case, the world either yawned, rejected it outright ("I don't want to browse my desktop, damnit" was how one friend of mine put it), or sued them over it. Even if Google doesn't run afoul of the DOJ directly, Microsoft is going to love pointing to Chrome OS as clear indication of non-monopoly status the next time DOJ comes calling. If Google does manage somehow to annoy the DOJ antitrust personalities, well... let IBM and Microsoft tell you all about how much fun it is to try to innovate and bring products to market with lawyers looking over your shoulders.
• Haven't we seen this before? Not too long ago, another vendor tried to go after the "you don't need an operating system" story... except they called it "The Network Is the Computer". All you Java developers, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have their hand raised, ask what happened to that vendor from any of the people with their hand in the air. Or ask an Oracle DBA.
• Haven't we seen this before? Even more recently, another vendor made a play for the netbook+cloud story. All those who've heard of Cloud OS, raise your hand. Anybody who doesn't have your hand raised.... well, I wish I could tell you to go talk to the people with their hand raised, except I don't think anybody does.

This whole idea just feels badly-planned and not well thought-out. Let's see how it executes, so let's meet back here in a year and compare notes, but in the meantime, I'm not hanging up my Java or .NET tools any time soon.

Well, OK, the title is trolling ever so slightly, but there is an interesting trend at work, and I'm genuinely concerned about its ultimate expression if the trend continues to its logical conclusion. Have a look and tell me if you agree or disagree.

Apparently the Rails community isn't the only one pursuing that ephemeral goal of "edginess"—another blatantly sexist presentation came off without a hitch, this time at a Flash conference, and if anything, it was worse than the Rails/CouchDB presentation. I excerpt a few choice tidbits from an eyewitness here, but be warned—if you're not comfortable with language, skip the next block paragraph.

Yesterday's afternoon keynote is this guy named Hoss Gifford — I believe his major claim to fame is that viral "spank the monkey" thing that went around a few years back.  Highlights of his talk:

• He opens his keynote with one of those "Ignite"-esque presentations — where you have 5-minutes and 20 slides to tell a story — and the first and last are a close-up of a woman's lower half, her legs spread (wearing stilettos, of course) and her shaved vagina visible through some see-thru panties that say "drink me," with Hoss's Photoshopped, upward-looking face placed below it.
• He later demos a drawing tool he has created (admittedly with someone else's code) and invites a woman to come up to try it.  After she sits back down, he points out that in her doodles she's drawn a "cock."
• Then he decides he wants to give a try at using the tool to draw a "cock" (he loves this word) — and draws a face, then a giant dick (he redraws it three times) that ultimately cums all over the face.
• A multitude of references to penises and lots of swearing — and also "If you are easily offended, fuck you!"
• And then, to top it off, a self-made flash movie of an animated woman's face, positioned as if she's having sex with you, who gradually orgasms based on the speed of your mouse movement on the page.

Wow. Just... wow. To call this unprofessional smacks of calling Hitler a "socially awkward individual"... or using a euphemism like "mild medical condition" to refer to death. This is so far "over the line" that it's unbelievable. Even Mr. Aimonetti's "CouchDB" presentation, as bad as it was, at least tried to tie the analogy together in a meaningful, if offensive, way. This is just male posturing at its worst. (I'm shocked Hoss didn't whip off his pants and demand the women in the room bow down in worship to his obviously superior manhood.)

Fortunately, according to the source, the conference organizer seems to be pretty responsive, so kudos to the one adult in the room, but....

What's worse, apparently the presenter and more than a few of his pals are (in the best traditions of assholery) blatantly unrepentant about the whole thing, claiming the moral high ground in much the same way that the Rails idiots did—it's all in good fun, if you don't find it funny you're a prude, and so on:

I checked Twitter (hashtag #flashbelt) to see what the responses were.  Here are some notable remarks:

• Fonx is reading the #flashbelt rants on Hoss offending the ladies w/ a few swear words & a penis drawing - r u really that prudish & sexist?
• nthitz lol @hoss69 "If you are easily offended, fuck you" #flashbelt
• livenootrac Ladies of #flashbelt , I am sorry for the Hoss preso, but in the flash community he gets a pass, kinda like Don Rickles - that's just Hoss.
• CujoJpn @livenootrac And there were many ladies at #flashbelt who were offended by Hoss' Preso some were thick skinned and took it as is.

So, if you didn't like it then
a) you are a prude - and sexist (?)
b) fuck you
c) suck it because Hoss gets a pass here in the boy's club known as "the flash community" and
d) you are a wimpy girl who isn't strong enough / man enough / "thick-skinned" enough  to deal with it.

Even more... wow. Talk about justification and marginalization. Amazing.

Before I figuratively smack this Hoss guy around the blog for a while, let's take a brief moment for reflection—what's going on here? Why all the misogynistic presentations recently? Is this reflective of a general trend in the programming industry? Of society in general? Is the world coming to an end?

A few possibilities present themselves:

• The lack of women in the IT industry means there's nobody around to act as a "gender filter" to keep things on an even keel. In other words, the genders constantly filter themselves based on the company they keep, and because the boys who put these presentations together don't have female input, they simply don't know where to draw the line for mixed company. This theory also presumes that an industry that's made up primarily of women will also lack such a filter and "girls will be girls" as a result. Unfortunately I have no good counterexamples at hand to examine—anybody know of an industry populated primarily by women, and can weigh in with experience there? The closest I get is my brief experience working in a restaurant with an almost-all-woman serving staff, and from that brief experience, yep, the theory holds. Solution? Easy: get more women in IT, and things will re-balance themselves naturally.
• Programmers are principally males who have no redeeming social skills. In other words, the industry gathers up exactly the kind of men who find objectifying women and reveling in late-acquired testosterone overdoses to be gratifying, and this kind of behavior is the result. If true, it leads to the conclusion that programmers are no more evolved than the Navy sailors involved in the Tailhook scandal of a few years ago. So go ahead, smack your wives and girlfriends around a little if they get a little "uppity", it's OK, 'cuz u r a l33t d00d. Personally? I find the idea ludicrous—there is definitely a strong antisocial streak that runs through the IT ecosystem (how many of you met your friends via World of Warcraft again?), but like all stereotypes, there's some elements of truth to it, and a lot of exaggeration. And frankly, anybody who believes in this theory is welcome to come with me to dinner at a No Fluff Just Stuff show and meet the other speakers, and listen in on our "boys club" conversations, including questions like, "Which movie best represents the book it was made after?" and "If given a mandate to create a programming language, what language would your language most resemble?". Oh, and the odd fart joke. We are boys, after all.
• We're hypersensitive to the subject right now. In other words, these kind of presentations have always been going on, and it's just that we notice them now, in the same way that you notice a particular brand of car on the road a lot more when you're thinking about buying that brand and model of car. Frankly, I don't buy this argument—I've been to a lot of presentations over the past decade, and I've never seen any that were anything like this.
• This is the YouTube generation, with access to everything the Internet has to offer, and this is "just how they do things". After all, how much maturity, sexual discretion and adult behavior can we expect of the generation that gave us "Girls Gone Wild" and its ilk? It's just a "generation gap" thing, and we old fogies who didn't grow up with Internet porn just a browser-click away just don't "get it". Hmm.... somehow, I just don't buy it. Sure, there may be some elements of this involved here (I'm really curious to see what all these "Girls Gone Wild" girls are going to say to their own daughters in a decade or so...), but I think that's too easy an answer, and an eminently unhelpful one.
• We have copycatters out there trying to follow the path of people they respect. If you're looking up at this Hoss character and thinking, "I want to be just like him!", you really should see a therapist and develop a sense of self, before you find yourself without friends. Hoss gets a pass because of your misguided fan-boi hero-worship. So does Paris Hilton. You want to be the Paris Hilton of your social circle? Go for it. After all, she's highly respected and loved, right? Take a clue from the next car wreck you drive past—everybody's slowing to look not because they wish they were in the body bag, folks, but because we have a ghoulish fascination with it. In the case of Ms. Hilton, that ghoulish fascination is with those who self-destruct in spectacular fashion. (Me, I'd love to be the fly on the wall at the Hoss residence when he tries to explain this whole thing to his daughter or his date/girlfriend/wife, if he ever finds one.)
• The presenters taking this tack are looking for an easy path to fame. In the grand traditions of Andrew Dice Clay ("Oh!"), the easiest way for a presenter to "stand out" from the rest of the crowd of presenters is to do something outrageous and call it "edgy", and stake out a claim on the edge of the civilization, rather than try to integrate with the rest of the crowd and build something up slowly. Don Box has already claimed "HTTP is dead", I made the analogy between a technology and a military conflict, and Matt Aimonetti claimed a data storage framework "performs like a pr0n star", so what's left but to stake out ground even further out on the fringe and just be misogynistic? Fortunately, history suggests that people with content-free/shock-heavy presentations (or even content-heavy/shock-heavy ones) don't go the distance, so to speak, and that once there's nowhere more shocking left to go, the audience comes back to the content-heavy/shock-light discussions and stays there for a while. Unfortunately, this means we're going to have to suffer through somebody's "Live YouPorn filming" talk first, which I'm not looking forward to.

And now for the smacking around... but you know, I suddenly realize that the volume of comments on the original post leave with nothing to do or say that's not already being said, so to just "pile on" would only serve to let me vent, and I have other outlets for that. But it would be inappropriate to just "walk away", so to speak, so with that in mind....

Hoss, you're an idiot. Like any sprinter, you're going to head up the pack for a bit, but soon enough, your "shtick" is going to flame out and you'll be left behind with all the other "shock jocks" of the 80's who found their material unwelcome after a while. So enjoy the spotlight (such as it is) while you can. In the meantime, I'm off to revise a few presentations, and stick with solid ideas and analogies, and maybe dropping the odd F-bomb when I want to make a point, just for emphasis, because I know something you apparently don't:

Shock makes a point because of the contrast to the rest of the talk, not because of its inherent "edginess".

Meanwhile, by all means, continue to be an idiot. You just make me look better by comparison, for which I thank you.

Update: See below, but I wanted to include the text Mike Abercrombie (DM's owner) posted as a comment to this post, in the body of the blog post itself. "Ted - All of us at DevelopMentor greatly appreciate your admiration. We're also grateful for your contributions to DevelopMentor when you were part of our staff. However, all of us that work here, especially our technical staff that write and delivery our courses today, would appreciate it if you would check your sources before writing our eulogy. DevelopMentor is open for business and delivering courses this week and we intend to remain doing so." Duly noted, Mike. Apology offered (and hopefully accepted).

An email crossed my desk today, announcing that DevelopMentor, home to so many good people and fond memories, has (at least temporarily) closed its doors.

I admit to a small, carefully-cushioned place in my heart where I mourn over this.

DevelopMentor was such a transcendent place for me. Much, if not most or all, of the acceleration that came in my career came not only while I was there, but because I was there.

So much of my speaking persona and skill I owe to Ron Sumida, who took a half-baked neophyte of intermediate speaking skill, and in an eight-hour marathon session still referred to in my mental memoirs as my "Night with Scary Ron", shaped me and taught me tricks about speaking that I continue to use to this day. That I got to know him as a friend and confidant later still to this day ranks as one of my greatest blessings.

I remember my first DM Instructor Retreat, where I met so many of the names I'd read about or heard about, and feeling "Oh, my God" fanboy-ish. I remember Tim Ewald giving a talk on transactions at that retreat that left me agape—I seriously didn't understand half of what he was saying, and rather than feeling overwhelmed or ashamed, I remember distinctly thinking, "Wow—I have found a home where I can learn SO much more." It was like waking up one morning to find that your writing workshop group suddenly included Neal Stephenson, Stephen Pinker, C.S. Lewis and Ernest Hemingway. (Yes, I know those last two are dead. Work with me here.)

I remember the day that Lorie (the ops manager at the time) called me to say that Don Box wanted me to work with him on the C# course. I was convinced that she'd called the wrong Ted, meaning instead to reach for Ted Pattison in her Rolodex and coming up a few letters shy. She tartly informed me, "No, I know exactly who I'm talking to, and are you interested or not?" How could I refuse? Help the Diety of COM write DM's flagship course on Microsoft's flagship technology for the next decade? "Hmm...", I say out loud, not because I needed time to think about it, but because a thread in the back of my head says, "Is there any scenario here where I say no?"

I still fondly recall doing a Guerilla .NET at the Torrance Hilton shortly after the .NET 1.0 release, and having a conversation with Don in my hotel room later that night; that was when he told me "Microsoft is working on an open-source version of the CLR". I was stunned—I had no idea that said version would factor pretty largely in my life later. But it opened my eyes, in a very practical way, to how deeply-connected DevelopMentor was to Microsoft, and how that could play out in a direct fashion.

When Peter Drayton joined, he asked me to do a quick review pass on the reference section of his C# in a Nutshell, and I agreed because Peter was a good guy (and somebody I'd hoped would become a friend), and wanted to see the book do well. That went from informal review to formal review to "well, could you maybe make it an editing pass?" to "Would you like to write a few chapters?" to "Well, let's sign you up as a co-author...". That project is what introduced me to John Osborn, which in turn led him to call me one day and say, "Some guys at Microsoft are working on an open-source version of the CLR, and would like to have a 'professional writer' help them write a book on it. Interested?" That led to SSCLI Internals, working with David Stutz, and wow, did I learn a helluvalot from that project, too.

Effective Enterprise Java came through DevelopMentor, thanks again to Don Box, who introduced me to the folks at Addison-Wesley that put the contract (and Scott Meyers, another blessing) in front of me.

DM got me my start in the conference circuit, as well. In 2002, John Lam pinged me over email—he'd recently become track chair for Connections down in Orlando, and was I interested in speaking there? I was such a newbie to the whole idea, but having taught classes roughly twice every month, I wasn't worried about the speaking part, but the rest of the process. John walked me through the process, and in doing so, set me down a path that would almost completely redefine my career within a year or so.

Even my Java chops got built up—the head of our Java curriculum was Stu Halloway (recently of Clojure fame), and between him, Kevin Jones, Si Horrell, Brian Maso and Owen Tallman, man, did I feel simultaneously like a small child among giants and like a kid in a candy store. Every time I turned around, they'd discovered something new about the Java platform that floored me. Bob Beauchemin has forgotten more about databases in general than I will ever learn, and he had some insights on the intersection of Java + databases that still hang with me today.

And my start with No Fluff Just Stuff came through DevelopMentor, too. Jason Whittington heard through a mutual friend (Erik Hatcher, of Ant fame) about this cool little conference being held in Denver, and maybe I should look into it. That led to an email intro to Jay Zimmerman, a dinner together while I was teaching in Denver a few weeks later, and before I knew it, I was on the Denver NFJS schedule, including the speaker panel, where I uttered the then-infamous line, "Swing sucks. Get over it."

DevelopMentor, you shaped my career—and my life—in so many ways, you will always be a source of pleasant memories and a group of friends and acquaintances that I would never have had otherwise. Thank you so much.

Rest in peace.

Update: Well, as it turns out, I have to rescind at least part of my eulogy, as the post itself generated quite a stir—the folks at DevelopMentor were pretty quick to email me, pointing out that they're still alive and well. In fact, as one of them (a friend of mine still working there) put it, "We were all kinda surprised when we came to work this morning and discovered that we could go home." Fortunately, the DevelopMentor folks were pretty gracious about what could've been a very ugly situation, and I apologize for to them for the misunderstanding—all I can say is that my "source" must've also been mistaken, and I'm glad that we're all still good. And lest it need to be said out loud, I heartily want nothing but the best for DM, and hope that I never have to write this message again.

Since a number of people have been connecting to my blog via my last post on installing Windows 7 into a VMWare image, I thought since the Windows7 RC is now available, I'd update my experiences with installing it.

I downloaded the Windows7 RC ISO image (a freakishly hideous name containing every character on my US keyboard, plus a few in Klingon, I think.... if you can stand it, the full name of the ISO is 7100.0.090421-1700_x86fre_client_en-us_Retail_Ultimate-GRC1CULFRER_EN_DVD) from the Microsoft CONNECT website, not bothering with any of the other images (x64, ia64, and a "server" image I've not explored yet), using Microsoft's File Transfer Manager. (I know, I know, somebody's going to complain again about the ISOs not being available via a straight HTTP download or Torrent, but this is just an RC release, folks, and this is ostensibly to Microsoft-friendly customers who already have the FTM utility installed.) Took about 3+ hours to download on my home connection... or so it claimed. I went to bed after starting it last night. It was done when I woke up. What more do you want from me?

I created a new VMWare image, as a "Windows Vista" VM with 1GB RAM, a 60GB IDE hard disk (by default Fusion wants to create a 40 GB SCSI disk, but IDE seems to play nicer with the early betas of Microsoft OS'es, and I made it all one file rather than Fusion's default "Split into 2GB files" option), with the experimental 3D graphics turned on, battery status turned off, and (this is HUGE) the "Allow your Mac to open applications in the virtual machine" option turned OFF. Can't repeat this enough, for ANY VMWare VM containing Windows inside of it, turn off that option—leaving it on sucks up HUGE amounts of CPU time. (It's barely documented, and only determined Googling found that this was what was rendering my VMWare Fusion 2 images all but unusable.)

I attached the ISO to the VMWare CD and turned the thing loose. It takes a while, but so long as the ISO file and the VMWare VMDK disk file are on separate drives, the perf isn't too bad—roughly twenty minutes later (or, as I measure things, one randomly-generated map game of Pax Galaxia later), the image had installed all the core files on the VM disk, restarted itself, finished the installation, and restarted itself again. (I have no idea why Win7 wants to reboot itself twice during the install—if I remember the Vista installs correctly, it only restarts once). As I write this, I'm starting at the "Setup is preparing your computer for first use" screen with the funky Cylon-like flashing bar underneath the text (I'm serious, it really looks like the graphic artists at Microsoft are paying homage to BSG during that Setup screen). Whoops, I take it back—got through that screen rather quickly, and now we're into the username/password/product key stage. Plug that in, set the Update policy, the date and time, the network defaults (Public Location for all my VMs, just because), and.... "Welcome".

There's no Step Four. Although, according to Windows Update, there's already an update for Windows7 that should be downloaded and installed. *grin* Actually, it seems like the driver it installed was for the VMWare virtual sound device, which normally doesn't kick in until I install the VMWare Tools. It tells me that this is an "Unsupported Creative Sound Device", however, so maybe it's an older driver. *shrug* Not sure, don't care, because my next step is....

Install the VMWare Tools. I install VMWare Tools in the image, after the Update is complete. (No restart was required, so why not?) Actually, let me rephrase that—I tried to install the VMWare tools, but when I selected it from the Fusion menu bar... nothing happened. Hmm. OK, let's do the restart and see what happens. VM shuts down quickly enough (no having to wait for updates to finish, which was somewhat annoying with Vista), and when I restart, it seems to restart quickly enough (again, no obvious updates to be installed), so I get to a working desktop (640x480, how did we ever think this was reasonable?!?), and try the Install VMWare Tools option from the Fusion menubar again. It thinks for a bit, and the cursor flashes to the "pointer-with-CD" icon for a second before flashing back, but after a few seconds, the "What do you want to do?" (Autoplay) menu pops up as if I'd slipped the CD into the drive, so all looks good. Go through the UAC "Continue/Cancel" dialog (see below), choose "Complete" for the VMWare Tools install options, and let 'er rip. Disks spin, lights flicker, and a "VMWare Shared Tools" network folder shows up on the Win7 desktop, indicating that it's suddenly discovered the Shared Folder (to my MacOS user account) is there. But now we're back to the Windows-display-exercise program, which leads me to believe that it's the VMWare driver that's doing the exercise, not Windows itself. (VMWare? Anybody listening and care to comment?)

And now I'm into Win7 desktop customization steps, things like display sizing and desktop icon selection, background image, and all that other jazz that you probably don't care about. (If you do, then I'm a bit worried about you—be an individual! Choose your own settings!) All in all, pretty flawless and smooth.

Thoughts on the process:

• It feels like we're getting away from the "minimal install" process that Vista tried to create. For a while, there was a meme that said that installing Windows was too hard for the average person, and Microsoft promised to reduce the number of steps it had to go through to install the OS. Take the date/time screen, for example: it picked up the defaults from the underlying (virtual) hardware, why not just assume those and skip that step? Users can always change it later.
• I still have to set a Administrator password. I know that Microsoft is trying to find that sweet-spot balance between "too secure" and "unsecure" for desktop operating systems, but I have to hand it to the Ubuntu folks here—the "passwordless root" idea that they use is pretty slick. MacOS uses it (for the most part) in places, as well. I like the balance that approach achieves: it forces the user to enter "superuser" mode to do something sensitive, but it isn't challenging for a password (unless the superuser installs one) every time.
• It's not going through display-screen calesthenics on each startup with this build. My previous Win7 image, every time I restart the VM, goes through every possible video/monitor size combination before settling in on the resolution I established in the last session. That was a bit disconcerting, until I realized that it's Windows trying to get some exercise in to be less overweight. *grin*
• What, no PowerShell installed by default? Either it's not there, or it's buried pretty deeply. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) is right where it's always been, under Accessories, but no PowerShell.... Whoops, no, I take it back, it's in a folder underneath Accessories, forcing one more click to get to it. Hey Microsoft: do me a favor and pin that guy to the Start Menu. Make it easy for me to use, if you really want me to believe that this is supposed to replace Command Prompt someday.
• On that note, though, the PowerShell "ISE" (Interactive Scripting Environment) is an interesting and new toy to play with.
• "Pin to Taskbar" is an interesting option that I'm going to have to play around with. Not being a huge MacOS Dock fan (which is pretty clearly the inspiration for the new Taskbar), I'm not sure how well I'll like the new "it's the QuickLaunch and the Taskbar combined" idea.

Overall, I'm looking forward to putting a few things into this image (VS 2008, VS 2010, Office, and so on) and seeing how it reacts. As always, your mileage may vary, no implied warranties with this blog post, blah blah blah, but if you do anything with the Windows OS, you really should get hold of the RC (build 7100) and put it into a Virtual PC, VMWare, VirtualBox, Xen or some other virtualized box to play with. Like it or not, it's entirely reasonable to believe that Windows7 is going to win a few folks back from the Vista "less-than-I-expected" crowd.

As always, caveat emptor, and feel free to comment....

It's been going around in developer circles now for a few days, this whole controversy about the "Perform like a pr0n star" presentation from the Golden Gate Ruby Conference and the related accusations of misogyny and sexism and overblown accusations and double-standardisms and what-all else, and I've deliberately waited to let opinions in my head settle out before blogging on the whole thing. Sara J Chipps reacts on her blog, and the comments to her comments are also somewhat... interesting... to note.

Without any particular implied importance or order:

• Matt Aimonetti, you are an idiot. You had to know that this was going to generate more than a few strong reactions. I'll admit, it's a funny title, and it definitely generated a ton of buzz around your name, but for the rest of your life, you're going to be "the porno Rails guy", and in about a year or so, it's not going to be funny anymore. You've touched off a firestorm, and you can't very well hide from it, and frankly, I think the short-term boost to your public recognizance is going to be more than outweighed by the long-term judgments that will be levied against you. "Wait, this is the guy who did that talk? Wow. I bet he's a good developer, but can I risk him pulling the same kind of stunt at a meeting with our VP or clients? Nah, I'll go for this other guy...."
• Clearly we have a lot of issues to work out in the programming industry. I'm not going to go into the rights or wrongs of putting those images into his talk. I'm talking about the discussion that followed (one comment here says, "Matt Aimonetti is obviously an antisocial twerp still living in his mothers basement at the age of 35 who has never even been able to muster up the courage to actually talk to a real-life woman, let alone respect one.", and a follow-up comment says, "Great presentation, nevermind the jackasses, keep up the good work!"), and the fact that at no point in the time leading up to this presentation did anybody pull Mr. Aimonetti off to one side and say, "Dude, it was funny when we thought of it, sure, but it's time to stop." If ever we wanted to convince the rest of the world that the programming industry wasn't populated by a bunch of 13-year-olds giggling over the fact that somebody said, "Boobies".... well, maybe next year.
• Ruby community, you have a long way to go if you want to convince people to spend money on you. Maybe you don't mind that corporations think that you guys are clearly unstable and immature. If/when you want to gain some degree of corporate acceptance, and maybe make it out of your parents' basement someday, you're going to have to learn that how you handle yourself in public goes a long way towards establishing peoples' attitudes towards you as professionals, and right now, you all collectively look like a bunch of 13-year-olds, what between this and DHH's famous "FUCK YOU" presentation of a few years ago. If you're OK with not being taken seriously, then cool, more power to you. But personally, I like the idea of making money at things I like to do and have fun doing, and you're not helping yourselves.
• Why are we such prudes? Whether you agree or not with the rightness of the "porn" metaphor, you have to admit that there is factual basis in the bones of this particular comment: "This is probably the least offensive thing I've seen in 3 weeks." Glance at the billboards in the airport next time you're walking to the gate. Glance at the racks of magazines in the grocery store as you prepare to check out. Glance at the beer commercials on TV during prime-time. In every case, sexy, young, attractive, scantily-clad men and women seek to create an instinctive emotional reaction inside your head to subconsciously create a feel-good link between whatever product is being hawked and your id. Honestly, the photos in the presentation are hardly all that titillating—and a very long ways from the kind of commercials you can see on TV in Europe—so why are we getting up in arms over this?
• Matt Aimonetti, you are an idiot. Notice how nobody's talking about the actual subject of your presentation? A good presenter knows that the message should never outstrip the delivery mechanism, just like a sauce should never overpower the flavor of the dish it accompanies. For all that the content of your presentation might have been spot-on, the lessons that might have been learned from the presentation have drowned in the "He's a pig!" "No he's not!" that has followed. Great job there, mate. Way to get your message across.
• To the commenter on the presentation page who said, "ps [sic] feminism is dead", get a clue. Women still, on average, get paid less than men do for an equivalently-skilled employee in the same job. Maybe it's not $.50 to every $1 as it used to be, but so long as it's even measurable, there's work to be done. This industry in particular has absolutely no reason for gender discrimination in any form, since there's absolutely nothing "physical" about what we do. (Ditto for medicine and law, for that matter.)
• Presentations reach far beyond just the attendees. One commenter on Sara's blog notes, "What an over reaction, there was nothing wrong with that presentation, i wouldn't show it to a board room but as far as showing it to a ruby developers conference then no probs." Frankly, that's a short-sighted attitude, making the presumption that someone of the suit-and-tie set (those supposedly inhabiting the "board room" where this kind of presentation isn't appropriate) wouldn't actually be in the audience at a ruby developers conference. Oh, granted, when in Rome, one has to expect Romans to act like Romans, but that just means that the Ruby community isn't welcome inside the board room, right? (Somehow I doubt this is what the numerous people who are trying to make money off of Ruby really want.) Fact is, that presentation is now captured by the Internet for all time, and it will forever be known as "The Ruby Porno Presentation", and it's an even money bet that somebody in that board room has seen the presentation (and the video, and the play-by-play from the people who had friends who had friends that were there....).
• To the commenters who say, "You asked for it", get a clue. Commenters have suggested that the title should have clued people into what was coming: "I'm totally flabbergasted no one has stated the obvious here: if you see a presentation labeled "CouchDB: Perform like a pr0n star" and you choose to go to it, don't act all surprised when R-rated images are used as props." Sorry, no biscuit. Presenters use analogies and imagery all the time in their titles in order to "sell" their talks. Recently I was part of a talk that was labeled as a "smackdown"—did that mean the audience should have expected to see images of physical violence? If I title my next talk as something that's "hard-core", should you expect to see images of ball gags and snuff film clips? This is what happens when we co-opt terms like "smackdown" and "hard-core"—you can't fall back to the original meanings and then claim ignorance when people misunderstand how you're going to use them. (God only knows what Mr. Aimonetti would have done for a presentation on "Naked Objects". *shudder*)
• Matt Aimonetti, you are an idiot. You could have had your joke and keep it tasteful too. You do, in fact, from time to time in the early part of the presentation: the photo of the "little blue pills" was perfect, offering a hint as to what you meant while keeping the double-entendre alive. Every single "objectionable" photo in that presentation could have been replaced by a more subtle one that kept everybody's mind on the subject and still got the point across. The fact that you resorted to the heavy-handed imagery only proves that you wanted to beat the audience's head with it.
• Please, let the one-ups-manship stop. Can we please agree that moving and powerful presentations can be done without having to resort to cheap tricks? They almost always come off badly, particularly when you have to keep the gag running for a full hour or so. Anybody remember Marc Fleury's "Joker" retinue at TheServerSide a half-decade ago? Can you tell me what his presentation was about? Now, consider Dave Thomas' "Cargo Cults" talk from NFJS around the same time—what was he covering? If you were there for both talks, chances are you remember Dave's talk far better than you remember the Fleury keynote beyond the fact that he wore Joker face paint the entire time. Good presentations are about using humor to underscore and support the message, and not making humor the central point of the message. Think about that before you start reaching for the bad innuendo.
• Is this really the kind of industry we want? Granted, it may seem like all of this is way overblown if you're a 25-year-old guy recently graduated from college and hacking on your first or second Rails project. "What do these grumpy idiots not understand about 'it's a joke'? My God, is everybody nuts? Are they trying to say that we can't have fun at work or with what we do?" To which all I can say is two things: one, check in with yourself five or ten years from now, when your daughters are learning about body images by staring at pictures of women who are entirely artificial (and yes, guys, those pictures you see are entirely artificial, having been touched up and enhanced in many ways), and two, you're more than welcome to have whatever jokes you like at whomever's expense you like, in private. This wasn't in private. A developer conference is not a private locale. More importantly, though, think about it—when you bring your girlfriend to work, do you want her hearing those same jokes that buddies toss off back and forth? What seems like "harmless fun" now, may have a very different feel to it for you a few years from now.

I'll freely admit, I drop profanity from time to time in my presentations. And to everyone who comes up afterwords (figuratively and literally) saying I shouldn't use such offensive language, I apologize, and point out that I did so in order to underscore the point, knowing that I'm taking that risk, and knowing that I may be required to offer up apologies after the fact for having offended them. (To date, those apologies still number in the single digits.) So perhaps I am no better than Mr. Aimonetti in the final accounting of things.

But all of this loses sight of a core principle. Regardless of the efficacy of his presentation, regardless of your feelings about the subject matter, regardless of your thoughts around the overblown-or-not nature of this discussion, a deeper principle is at stake here, that of professional presentation etiquette: Mr. Aimonetti, you owe an apology to anyone and everyone that was offended by your presentation (for whatever reason). Failure to deliver that, in my mind, equates to a personal and professional FAIL on your part.

When you stand up on stage, and you say something that somebody finds offensive, you owe that person an apology, even if you think their reasoning or rationale is bogus.

It's simple common courtesy.

Recently, NFJS alum and buddy Dion Almaer questioned the widespread, almost default, usage of a relational database for all things storage related:

Ian Hickson: “I expect I’ll be reverse-engineering SQLite and speccing that, if nothing better is picked first. As it is, people are starting to use the database feature in actual Web apps (e.g. mobile GMail, iirc).”

When I read that comment to Vlad’s post on HTML 5 Web Storage I gulped. This would basically make SQLite the HTML 5 for storage in the browser. You would have to be a little crazy to re-write the exact semantics (including bugs) of SQLite and its dialect. What if you couldn’t use the public domain code?

Gears lead out strong with making a relational database part of the toolbox for developers. It embedded its own SQLite, in fact one that was customized to have the very cool full text search ability. However, this brings up the point of “which SQLite do you standardize on?”

The beauty of using SQL and SQLite is that many developers already know it. RDBMS has been mainstream for donkey’s years; we have tools to manage SQL, to view the model, and to tweak for performance. It has gone through the test of time.

However, SQL has always been at odds with many developers. Ted Neward brought up ORM as the vietnam of computer science (which is going a touch far ;). I was just lamenting with a friend at Microsoft on how developers spend 90% of their time munging data. Our life is one of transformations, and that is why I am interested in a world of JavaScript on client and server AND database. We aren’t there yet, but hopefully we can make progress.

One of Vlad’s main questions is “Is SQL the right API for Web developers?” and it is a valid one. I quickly found that for most of my tasks with the DB I just wanted to deal with JSON and hence created a wrapper GearsDB to let me insert/update/select/delete the database with a JSON view of the world. You probably wouldn’t want to do this on large production applications for performance reasons, but it works well for me.

Now a days, we have interesting APIs such as JSONQuery which Persevere (and other databases) use. I would love to see Firefox and other browsers support something like this and let us live in JSON throughout the stack. It feels so much more Webby, and also, some of the reasons that made us stay with SQL don’t matter as much in the client side world. For example, when OODBMS took off in some Enterprises, I remember having all of these Versant to Oracle exports just so people could report on the darn data. On the client the database is used for a very different reason (local storage) so lets use JSON!

That being said, at this point there are applications such as Gmail, MySpace search, Zoho, and many iPhone Web applications that use the SQL storage in browsers. In fact, if we had the API in Firefox I would have Bespin using it right now! We had a version of this that abstracted on top of stores, but it was a pain. I would love to just use HTML 5 storage and be done.

So, I think that Firefox should actually support this for practical reasons (and we have SQLite right there!) but should push JSON APIs and let developers decide. I hope that JSON wins, you? I also hope that Hixie doesn’t have to spec SQLite :/

Dion's right when he says "developers spend 90% of their time munging data" and that "Our life is one of transformations", but I think he's being short-sighted and entirely narrow-minded when he says, "I am interested in a world of JavaScript on client and server AND database." Dion, I love you, man, but you're falling prey to the Fallacy of the One True Language. JavaScript (or ECMAScript, as its official name is given) is an interesting and powerful language, but why do you want to force your biases and perceptions on the rest of the world, man? You're being just as bad as the C++ or Java guys were in their heyday—remember when Java stored procedures were all the rage because "everybody knows that Java is the wave of the future"?

The fact is, from where I stand, there is no one storage solution or language solution or user-interface solution that is the Right Thing To Do in all situations. Not even inside the browser. There will be situations where a SQLite is the Right Thing, and other situations where a document-oriented JSON-like or CouchDB-like thing will be the Right Thing, and trying to force-feed one into a situation that's best solved by the other is a bad idea.

Dion alludes to my article about the Vietnam of Computer Science, but in fact, his suggestion charges right into another quagmire—how long before somebody starts trying to create a JSON-to-RDBMS adaption layer? Or JSON-to-CouchDB? Or things equally ridiculous? The fact is, data has three fundamentally different "shapes" to it, and trying to pound data from one shape into the other has all the efficacy and elegance to it just as much as pounding round pegs into square holes does. Dion even alludes to this with this paragraph:

One of Vlad’s main questions is “Is SQL the right API for Web developers?” and it is a valid one. I quickly found that for most of my tasks with the DB I just wanted to deal with JSON and hence created a wrapper GearsDB to let me insert/update/select/delete the database with a JSON view of the world. You probably wouldn’t want to do this on large production applications for performance reasons, but it works well for me.

JSON is certainly an attractive representation format for ECMAScript objects, thanks to its fundamental roots in ECMAScript's object literal syntax, and the powerful/dangerous eval() functionality offered by ECMAScript environments, but JSON also lacks a number of things a SQL-based dialect has, including a powerful query syntax for selecting individual and subsets of entities from the whole, which only becomes more and more necessary as the data base itself gets larger and larger. (Anybody who suggests that a local browser store would only remain within a certain size is clearly not thinking further ahead than the current day. Look at how cookies are outrageously abused as local storage for a lot of sites, or how Viewstate was abused in early ASP.NET apps—if you give the HTML/front-end developer a local storage mechanism, they will use it, and use it as far and as long and as hard as they can.) On top of which, JSON simply doesn't have the years of solid backing behind it than a SQL-based storage format does. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Ironically, just as JSON is a scheme for representing native objects in some kind of data format (in this case, a plain-text one), developers casually ignore the idea of storing objects in a native data format with all of the other bells-and-whistles that a database provides. Naturally, I'm referring to the idea of an object database—if JSON is appropriate for storing certain kinds of data in certain scenarios, then why isn't it appropriate to consider a native object database for some of those same certain kinds of scenarios? Not that I have anything against a JSON-based database scenario—in fact, I can easily imagine a JSON database that indexes the properties of the stored objects and takes ECMAScript functions as "native queries" in the same way that db4o doe. But let's stop with the repeated attempts at "one size fits all", and just accept that the world is a polyglot world, and that no one language—or data storage format, or data access API—will be the Right Thing To Do for all scenarios. Each language, format, API or tool has a reason to exist, a particular way it looks at the world, and optimizes itself to work best when used in that particular style. Trying to force one into the terms of the other is the road to another Computer Science quagmire.

Viva la Polyglot!

A friend of mine, from Canada, recently decided not to come to the US anymore.

Today was my final time trying to enter the US to do what many other people have done in my industry before: go and speak at a conference.

The reason I was given this time was that although I had forfeit the speaking fee they were going to pay me, I was still going to be speaking at a conference where other speakers were getting paid, and that there was no reason an American couldn’t fill that spot. When I asked if there would have been any issue if the conference was a free one and nobody was getting paid, I didn’t get an answer.

D'Arcy's experience at the border control reflects a growing dilemma that other speakers in my industry have also been facing: when you travel overseas to speak at a conference, and you get the dreaded "What are you here for?" question, should you tell them the truth and face the battery of questions that boil down to "Are you taking any money out of the country?", or should you lie, claim you're on vacation, and point out how you're putting money into the country in question?

Particularly when the organizers of the conference have every reason to prefer people at home—financial, lack of cultural barriers, reduced language barriers, and more—and invite me to come speak, anyway?

Note that because the US Border Patrol apparently Googles people when they stop at the border,

This all started of course when I was up-front and honest about the speaking engagement the first time I went through, which flagged me in their system. This became very obvious this past weekend when I attended the Twin Cities Code Camp and was at the border for an hour. On that entry I specified that I was going for a shopping weekend, which I was; I was also planning on going to the Twin Cities Code Camp, a free event and one that I was volunteering at. I didn’t mention that because why confuse the issue trying to explain what a code camp was, that it was free, and why I would consider speaking for free. This was a mistake for two reasons…

For one, they do have internet at CBP offices. So if you’re flagged, and you have to go for secondary interviewing, realize that you may be Googled. And as such, blog posts talking about said code camp or eating a Chipotle Burrito may appear as well (“So how was the burrito?” was a question I was asked).

... and because there's no reason to assume other nations' border patrol won't do the same thing, I'm not going to answer that question. I don't want my views aired on a public forum and in the context of a particular discussion acting as a convenient reason for a bureaucrat to create heartache for the citizens of his country that are expecting me to come and help them be more useful and productive and competitive.

D'Arcy's spot-on right on one point, and I applaud him for saying it:

Canadians have long taken for granted our border with the USA. If there’s one thing this experience has taught me, its that there is an air of entitlement that we’ve had in regards to being able to cross over and do whatever we want in the US. We assume that we’ll be as welcome as we were in the past, and that there really isn’t that much difference between us: we drive the same cars, watch the same television and movies, listen to the same music, read the same books.

That "entitlement" isn't limited to just Canadians—other citizens of other Western nations, including my own, feel that same sense of entitlement. Border control is just a hassle, just another annoying obstacle keeping me from my travel destination, just like airport security and agricultural inspections. (Having lived in Stamford, CT in the 70s when entire forests were being depopulated by some sort of caterpiller/moth infestation, and in LA in the 80s when we had to stay indoors at night as the authorities did overhead spraying of Malathion over our house at night to kill off the fruit fly infestation, I'm really kinda sensitive to the need for those ag inspections.)

But the fact is, you are leaving your country, and the laws you grew up with, and entering a new country, one which owes you nothing.

But we are different. We are separate, independent entities with different history, values, and morals. So to the second reason why that was a mistake: I, as a Canadian, have no right to make a call as to whether I’m of a benefit to a neighbouring country. I can rationalize all I want that the event is free, and that I’m actually trying to help other Americans by sharing my knowledge, but that’s not my call to make.

The US is in a state of protectionism right now whether they admit it or not. When you continue to hear about the vast number of jobs being lost, it makes sense that they want to ensure their people are being protected first and foremost. Many of those people include friends of mine whose companies are laying off people.

(By the way, D'Arcy, you misspelled "neighboring".)

As much as D'Arcy has the right attitude about the ways in which nations get to make decisions for their little plots of land upon the earth, and our ability to argue with them, I still want to point out that the whole economic protectionist argument has been used before, and it's pretty much been debunked at a number of levels. (I'm not going down the path of talking about border security, which is a different issue entirely and not what stops D'Arcy from coming to the US.)

The debate around protectionism has been around as long as people have studied economics as a formal "science", and the end results are pretty clear: everybody benefits when the borders are open and unrestricted. The "multiplier effect" that macroeconomists talk about more than makes up for whatever "drain" a foreigner imposes on the local economy.

Note: For those of you who haven't heard of the multiplier effect, it works like this: while in the US to speak at whatever conference he wants to speak at, D'Arcy spends a dollar at a hotel gift shop, of which the hotel uses $.95 to pay its local worker's hourly wage, of which the worker spends $.90 on a hot dog for lunch, of which the hot dog stand operator uses $.85 to buy buns for tomorrow's customers.... And so on. Why aren't we spending the full dollar each time? Mostly because people will often save some portion of that dollar (unless you're American, because we don't save anything, it seems), and because the government will take some portion of that dollar each time in taxes. What this means, though, is that the US$1 that D'Arcy spent turned into US$4 or US$5 or more towards the total GDP of the country. Econ is a fascinating subject sometimes.

And, of course, ask any three economists a question, and you'll get five different answers. This subject is no different: protectionism has its proponents, too, usually when the local economy is taking a hit... like now. It feels right, protecting those who are "close to home" (and believe me, I'm sympathetic, I've had friends who've pinged me about finding a new job within the last six months), but in the end, everything it does is artificial—in much the same way that unions artificially keep wages high for union workers, and impose some serious constraints on the companies that employ them. (I don't think it's an accident that industries being hammered mercilessly by the soft economy—the auto manufacturers and the airlines—are also ones with large union populations.) Protectionism is almost always a short-term gain, long-term loss kind of operation. The "perennial gale of creative destruction" (from Alan Greenspan's Age of Turbulence) isn't always gentle, but it is necessary.

D'Arcy, in the end, closes his piece with a fond wish:

My hope is that at some point the US and Canada will be able to get back to where our countries were before 9/11. At the same time though, I hope that Canada realizes during this time that it has its own identity; that we are more than just who we border against. Maybe locking down the border will become a good thing after all.

Frankly, my wish would be for Canadians to realize their own identity (and I think Canadians are pretty aware of this in the same way that Americans don't even realize that it's a problem), as well, assuming that's even a problem. What's more, I think that Canadians will find that they don't need the US nearly as much as Americans like to think they do.

But locking down the border is going to affect more than just Canadians—my fear is that this protectionist attitude will in fact deter other really bright people from coming to the US and sharing their knowledge and wisdom, or even just participating in our economy for a while. Assume for just a moment that the million or so H-1B visas currently allocated are suddenly all revoked and their holders must return to their countries of origin—how many rent checks, car payments, utility bills, movie nights, dinners at local restaurants and bank accounts are going to be exiled with them? And this doesn't even begin to touch the potentials for racism that lurk hidden within the system—granting visas and citizenship more easily to "Westerners" (Brits, Germans, Australians, whatever) than "foreigners" (Hispanics, Indians, Chinese).

The fact is, this "locking down the border" won't help us, in the long-term. Whatever benefits we as Americans accrue from keeping our jobs intact will be lost when those barriers finally come down and we find we can't compete on the global scale. The "perennial gale of creative destruction" can't be bought off, it can only be delayed. (Ask the Soviets Russians about their success with the high-protectionist tactic the next time you're in Moscow or St. Petersburg.)

At some point, the borderless Internet is going to come crashing against the bordered "real world", and it's not going to be a pretty fight. And we, those of us who define and shape and act as the primary consumer and producer of the Internet's benefits, are going to find ourselves facing some uncomfortable choices.

In the meantime, however this story ends, I want to be able to say that my country acted in its own defense, but without prejudice, malice, or ignorance. But I'm very worried that I won't be able to say that... and I'm worried what damage we will do to ourselves in the interim.

(Editor's note: It will be fascinating to see how many people call me an ignorant racist based on nothing more than the blog title. You want to disagree with me, that's fine, just do so on a material basis from the body of the post, not just the title.)