Clic!Dev, ‘Tate, and many more projects!

I read Nick Halstead’s “10 Reasons Why I hate Recruitment Agents” with interest.

I would like to add two more reasons, that I have personally experienced:

1. Asking me to come meet them
This is my favourite one. Nick wrote about agents asking to come meet him. I can see why they try to push for a meeting, this makes competitive sense.
But how about that recruiter who asked me to visit their office so that I could talk to their candidates? What makes them think that, on top of having to deal with their unsolicited phone calls, I would like to maximize the waste of time by driving to their damn office to let them bludgeon me with bogus resumes and run unprepared interviews with deer-in-the-headlights candidates? This beggars reason.

2. They also lie to the job applicants
In case you had any doubt about this, it happens. I’ve been there myself. I went to an interview with a big banking organization; I had only agreed to this interview after several weeks of them chasing me (I was already happily employed) and was supposed to be interviewed for a job as a team lead. It took me a solid 10 minutes of awkward q&a with the company recruiter to realize that they had basically decided to see if they could instead sell me as a junior programmer. Again, I have no idea whatsoever what it is that they were trying to achieve.
So, that’s my experience. Deplorably, it is a situation that has also happened to me when interviewing people, only to realize that they had basically been lied to regarding the position offered.

These two reasons, put together, lead me to think that rather than standard scum, these people are fiercely deluded.

Funny, how everybody is gazing at everybody else’s navel in our little world - disclaimer: I do not consider myself a Web2.0 “celebrity”, simply because I’m not - but even so it’s hard to always keep in mind that we are only talking about a very minor percentage of the world population, so busy are we all trumpeting that we are “building the future.”
Are we?

Loren Feldman’s quite innocent puppet show is now over. He wrote an open letter to Shel Israel, who was the butt of this particular joke, and that letter is quite bitter.
We are, in effect, moving from a situation where Shel Israel would have done himself some good by taking the joke graciously and instead damaged his image by over reacting, to one where Loren Feldman is the one reacting quite poorly - see his comments to his own post.

It would seem that Dave Winer is next. I will not go into details on this one, just read the comments at 1938media.com if you are that curious.

Some background: Shel Israel claims that he only met Feldman once, at SXSW, thus when Feldman writes “You and your crew”, he may be referring to Robert Scobble. True, it would appear that Feldman was fired from PodTech after posting his retarded “TechNigga” video. No link, I do not want Google to find a link from my blog to that. True, Scobble may have helped with the firing business. Honestly, I do not think that Scobble needed to intervene for people to realize of how little value the piece was. OK, there is always the possibility that there was a double layer of sarcasm: Feldman mocking people who rely on such stereotypes.

Well, that’s too bad: Feldman should move on. Israel should move on. There is money and sponsorship for everybody -well, everybody interesting- in the blogging world and I, for one, am reclaiming some much needed free time by unsubscribing from the blogs of people who keep obsessing over their jobs, Arrington, Scobble, and other topics that, while somewhat topical, live at the bottom of my list of things I give a hoot about. Yay!

My favourite blog post was made by Chris Edward and is titled “Loren Feldman: fighting for old media one blogger at a time.” It deliciously underscores the multi-facetted irony of Feldman’s post in such a compact post that it is a treasure of “content vs ego” ratio in my opinion. Suitably entertained, I decided to read more of Edward’s blog posts and found them interesting.

As a result, Chris Edward wins a new reader, others lose an old reader. If more people followed suit, I am sure that the numbers would have a welcome sobering effect on them.

I’m glad I’m not famous.

I am looking for a few people to join my team full time - not sure yet if they will all join my main team of whether I will create a new team.
I am looking for talented developers; several profiles:

Profile #1
Web developers, who breathe web technologies and are not afraid of web languages such as PHP 5, Python, Ruby…Rapid Development methodologies will be used but you must also be a person capable of following a process such as CMM and CCPM (it’s actually pretty simple!)

Profile #2
Java developers, and I mean POJO, but also Spring, Tomcat, Axis2…No J2EE though.

Profile #3
Embedded developers who can work on the development of a solid system architecture. C is your language of choice. There will be some PHP as well.

But really, about you
You must have experience but more importantly you must be a smart individual.
Knowledge of web services is a real “plus.”
Knowledge of computer networking (IP, RIP, OSPF, MPLS… ) is a double “plus.”
Having heard of things such as Second Life is another “plus”

Why you should seize this opportunity
All jobs are located in sunny Southern California, pay is good (these guys are more or less on the ball); we offer full medical coverage, a great and flexible 401K (and I mean *great*), options, a cool team (no, really!), nerdy equipment… And I will twitter about you so it’s instant fame
There are many more reasons such as how friendly the team is to open source developers, or the 20% rule I offer to creative team members but I will try to keep this short. You get the idea…Oh, and if we can help with relocation if necessary.

The only catch is that I need to hear from you soon. So, send me your resume. Email jobs [at] voilaweb [dot] com

Introducing the team hat:

It’s a new feature! I spend way too much time reading interesting papers… I should not be so selfish as to not share them.

Steve Yegge’s ramblings will enlighten you or depress you, but at least they are enjoyable. There, on my list, right under Joel Spolsky (all-time Nerd Superstar).

Clustering and Cloud Computing

The Helmer Cluster, but only because I can also be a hardware nerd.
Dr Queue, not the only one, but a queue manager that proved its worth.
Terracotta because I have a big Java project that needs scaling and I believe that scaling out is a more…er…scalable approach.

Performance

I mean raw performance;  as in scaling up, this time.
Tokyo Cabinet seems to be the best tree-based database available these days. Takes me back to when I was using C-ISAM from Informix. NO, not all problems need a big OORDB thrown at them. In fact, transitioning some of your data to Tokyo Cabinet seems like a good application of “write first, optimize later.”
“How do they do it?” LinkedIn are kind enough to expose their architecture.
Twitter! Sorry, no link. Oh, well, maybe one. Oh, no, wait it’s down. No it’s back up! Wow, the Twitter API is currently capped to 10 requests per hour. Application developers: keep your calls to no more than one every 6 minutes…except for the public timeline, unless they decide to restrict its usage as well.

Wireframing, Blueprinting and A/B Testing

I need to post links here. Keep an eye on this blog entry.
Anyway, Yahoo now conveniently provides stencils for web mockups.

Erlang

It’s beautiful. I’m just getting started, though.

Git

For so-called “virtual companies” this would be the ultimate in source code management. Even if you’re not “virtual”, you may want to give it a try. I absolutely love how it allows me to try the craziest framework modifications without having to suffer any consequence.
Easy Git — “git for mere mortals”
Interact with your Subversion code base - man, I want the same thing for Perforce!
Educate yourself. Well, seems to work for me…

The “If I had more time…” section

NestedVM:  whatever your source language, cross-compile to MIPS .o files, then convert to pure Java.
Really optimized image colorization.

A quick note: I was reading Techcrunch earlier today, when I realized that I could not reconcile their post “Twitter at scale: Will it work?” with my views on how to build a scalable application.

Nick Cubrilovic contends that “Every new Twitter user and every new connection results in an exponentially greater computational requirement.”
And yet, I fail to see the exponential quality of it all.

It looks like Nick is saying: “I have U users, posting P posts, read by F followers. Hence, if I were to draw this on paper, I would end up with an exponential slope.”
That’s odd because, as I understand Twitter’s architecture, we indeed have U people posting P posts - BTW, P is unknown, and as Twitter goes I’d wager that the f(P) curve would be logarithmic; but I digress. Let’s, for simplicity’s sake, consider the total number of posts and call it X.
Now, Nick would obviously be referring to a f(F) curve. If F followers have to monitor X posts, then yes, I expect the slope to be exponential.
But that’s not how it works: Twitter is a pull service; each Twitter client regularly asks the server(s): “Do you have anything for me?” The server replies: “No” or “Yes, these x posts.” “x”, not “X” because only relevant posts are retrieved.
Since “F” is bound to be much bigger than “x”, and the overheard of retrieving multiple posts is very small compared to the time elapsed between two polls, it seems to me that the formula we should use here is that of a linear approximation.

Just my 2 cents. My math is *very* rusty but it seems to me that Nick’s argument doesn’t hold water.

I received this email today:

Your AdWords Google Account is stoped.
Dear Google AdWords Customer,

We were unable to process your payment.
Your ads will be suspended soon unless we can process your payment.
To prevent your ads from being suspended, please update your payment information.

Please sign in
to your account at http://adwords.google.com/select/login,
and update your payment information.

Of course I got suspicious right away, when I noticed the spelling of ’stopped’. But, hey, consider yourselves warned.

I just posted the text below at http://www.nextbbs.com/do_topic_title_nextBBS-direction–please-give-your-input_id_1288

I know that a lot of open-source projects have gone through the same dilemma:

• Now that we know what we know,
• Now that “these” components are available,
• Now that development on our old framework is slowing down because…it’s old

Well, what do we do now? Rip apart our existing software and restart with more up-to-date technologies, or keep building on the old workhorse, hoping that nothing will go wrong?
Continue reading »

When things start smelling “funny” in the open-source community, they tend to go to the dogs with the haste of a drunk marching band.

Today’s drama is brought to you by your friendly ExtJS community. For those of you not familiar with ExtJS, it is a professionally made Javascript library that allows web application developers to create very elaborate desktop-like applications. Jack Slocum originally started this project as a YUI extension. That extension being open-source. He’s then regularly improved it by adding support for different building stones such as JQuery and finally a full-ExtJS solution, reaching ExtJS 2.0. For those of you who have managed not to fall asleep while reading my ramblings, you already know that I’ve used ExtJS myself, for instance when I created the ExtPHP wrapper.

Where this gets complicated is that Jack decided to license the assets under a different license, allowing him to retain all rights. I would like to make very clear that it’s his work and he can do whatever he wants with it. I am just narrating, here. He also added a clause that supposedly completely voids the LGPL license if someone attempted to use his work to create a derivative framework.

After a lot of moaning in the community - to the drum of “that’s a GNU license, man, the whole idea is that you cannot add restrictions!”, he decided to change the LGPL license to a pure GPL one, while retaining a pure commercial license on the side. I’ll bet he thought, at that point, “At least now things are clear.”

Well, that was only the beginning of a real sh*tstorm that threatens to cause a lot of damage to everyone involved, culminating -fleetingly, to be sure- with Sanjiv Jivan’s scathing blog post. Sanjiv, if I am correct, wrote a Ext “compiler” for the GWT library, called GWT-Ext - note that there is another project, apparently endorsed by Jack, that connects ExtJS and GWT. Sanjiv decided that he would fork the last LGPL release of ExtJS and start a new project. You may remember that Jack tried to prevent this by adding a provision in his license agreement.

The crux of Sanjiv’s beef with Jack Slocum is this: Jack created a great product, led people to believe that it was truly open-source when it wasn’t, and doesn’t understand open-source licenses. Jack is greedy. Now, the crux of Jack’s beef with Sanjiv is this: Sanjiv created a nice tool based on hits product, doesn’t understand open-source licenses and, oh, is greedy.

So, our protagonists are not talking to each other. This love story was consumed a long time ago. And potential “corporate” customers, like me, are revisiting the possibility of building their product on top of pure JQuery extensions and living happily ever after.
Now, in a move that would shame any seasoned soap opera writer, a new character enters left stage. And her name is OpenEXT. Contrary to what Dion Almar wrote, it is not a fork: the idea is to create patches that can be dropped on top of ExtJS. Now, I am curious: was Dion right when he posted his own piece on the topic? After all, things seem to change at a meteoric pace around here.

Anyway, stay tuned for even more implausible developments!

Oh, no. Again, someone had something to say about open-source and again it seems that they only had a giant brush for the job.
OK, let’s go. Point by point. Note that I choose to also discuss frameworks despite Myle’s disclaimer, since their redeeming value seems to be that they comes as black boxes, therefore “you can still control your code.” Allow me to mention that you can do more than this. I would like, however, to apologize in advance for not coming up with more examples but I have to work on ClicDev…

“Unless your developers has[sic] spent A LOT of time working with the application, they aren’t going to know the code”

Well, true. There is always a learning curve involved. But this does not apply to open-source alone. Buy a commercial library and you will have to learn its ins and outs as well.

“Making core changes to a system is just asking for trouble”

Ok, so not about open-source either. Here is what I do not understand: if you pick a package for the task and end up modifying its core, are you sure that you picked wisely?

“Skinning pre-built applications sucks. Trying to modify some else’s CSS is worse than someone else PHP”

Obviously, I am not familiar with Myle’s past project experience, but this is where good practices usually save the day. Do not pick a package if their code is, indeed, “spaghetti”-style. Professionals - keep - their - stylesheets - clean.
Same goes for PHP, of course. Yes, the language is simple enough that it is very easy to make a mess of it. Just be picky when selecting a framework or an application. Price cannot be the only factor.

“Open source developers are very narrow minded […] you end up with a application that has everything that opens and shuts, but that doesn’t really open or shut very well.”

Well, thanks
What’s that about not doing the job very well? Are you referring to Linux, Apache, Drupal, Darwin or any other clunky loser that “doesn’t really work?”

“As soon as you modify software, forget about updating it.”

Well, I see two possible scenario here:
1. You download some open-source piece of software. You modify it and submit your modifications back to the open-source community and your code is integrated. No problem, right?
2. Either your submission is rejected or you prefer to keep your code closed. In that case, surely you will have started by preserving all the original code using a source control tool such as SVN, Perforce, GIT, etc. Any modification you make to that code is now part of a changelist. When you upgrade to a new version of the original open-source program, you easily reconcile your code with it using branch integration, right?

“I am yet to see a decent module system for anything but the most basic feature.”

And I do not know where to begin with this one. Maybe with some complex Wordpress modules that require no code modification, since you mention it?
Or the somewhat similar drop-ins system used by nextBBS?

“The documentation will never be up to date.”

I guess you were not impressed by Code Igniter, Drupal or Struts? (I pick whatever code I think of arbitrarily here… )

“Open source apps are hacked not engineered.”

Well, I will not even bother adding new links here. Just revisit some of the links I already posted. Where on earth do you get that kind of idea?

“If the project doesn’t have a clear leader who has a vision and is ruthless in implementing it, you are going to end up with a mess.”

Hey! I kind of agree with you - as one can find out reading some of my older posts. I do not know about “ruthless” but clear direction is key. However, why, again, misrepresent OSS this way? Do you have any statistics on the number of projects that one would seriously consider using for in-house development? Can you tell me, of those, which ones are purely “designed by committee” and which ones have clear leadership? I would wager that the latter are predominant - again, read my old posts, I already commented on failed “design by committee” projects.

“Support. You don’t get any.”

Again: What?
No support, as in “no support when using ExtJS?” Or “no support when deploying Drupal?”

If anyone wants to add something in the comments, I will gladly incorporate it in this post.

OK. Isn’t anyone going to put a bit of perspective on he whole Sarah Lacy thing?
Look, guys. Drop it. Seriously.

There isn’t a “Lacygate”. Stop postfixing everything you do not like with “-gate”. Now, Allen Stern wants Lacy to apologize.
I, too, was in the room, Allen - mind if I call you Allen?. And I did not walk out of the whole thing red in the face, looking for justice.
I merely felt that there was some joke between Lacy and Zuckerberg and I was not in on the joke. That’s OK, I thought. I’ll get some value from the interview as they move on. Granted, that never happened. Now, I will never be able to tell whether that didn’t happen because this was one of those “zero calories” interviews or because of the heckling.

I do not remember the exact timeline but I am fairly certain that she did not “run to Twitter” to tell us to screw off. I actually believe that writing this presupposes a cognizance of Twitter that she did not, at the time, master.
There is not doubt she reacted badly, but I find it a bit odd, to claim to have lived through this thing as a wronged customer. It was clearly announced that this was *not* going to be a groundbreaking event and, well, it wasn’t. I went to SXSW to learn things and network with other professionals - and party, but don’t tell my boss. Mission accomplished. Everything else should be treated like small potatoes. Because it is. Or it should be.