thoughts.on.code

Found this brilliant post on programmer screenings tonight on Steve Yegge’s old blog. Even though they are a few years old, these questions pack a serious technical challenge for anyone who doesn’t know their stuff in a broad range of programming kung-fu. Steve covers all of the basics (OO, scripting, data structures, real code, and cs fundamentals, recursion). The questions are designed to balance out each other, so you don’t get a YASD, and you don’t get a Perl hacker (unless they are really good).

Oooohhh boy do I feel sorry for the next person I interview! I touch on a number of these currently, but since there is usually a specific technology (ie Struts (shudder), J2EE (double shudder), or Hibernate (shrug)) involved, it becomes easy to look past some of the more fundamental questions, looking for a bit more depth in that one technology. Unfortunately, that is not a good idea. It is really easy for some people to memorize the talking points for a set of technologies, and maybe even have basic understanding of them. It is something else entirely for them to be able to tell you the underlying principles and concepts. And it is almost impossible to find someone who could tell you how they would implement it, and get a reasonable answer.

Man, now I’m itchin’ to do a screenin’! (and inexplicably writing with a drawl)

IMHO, SOA’s value proposition begins with the A in its acronym: architecture. There is sound, proven value in governing and growing a system’s architecture; there are also hard decisions that must be made, many decisions of which cannot be known a priori (which is why a process shaped around the rhythmic incremental and iterative release of executables is so important). There are many things we already know about what constitutes a good architecture and what does not. Stripped away of all the hype, a Service-Oriented Architecture is essentially a variant of well-proven message-passing architectural patterns.

- Grady Booch, “Snake Oil-oriented Architecture”

This is exactly what SOA should be about. Its not just services, its organization, its architecture. With all of the crap that we hear about how great SOA is, it is great to hear a grounded opinion about what we should care about.

Today is apparently a day of 50’s: 50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work

These strategies are slanted towards the writing (as in books, essays, etc) profession, but really that is not much different than the code writing profession. Good inspiration for coming up with your own strategies if nothing else.

Blaine just sent me an email pointing to Stuart Coleman’s excellent post: 50 Phrases that kill creativity.

This list shows that so many things that sound like rational statements in reality seriously affect our perspective.

I know that I have said most of these at some point in my career. I did not mean anything by it, in fact I am always trying to side on the prosperity of the project/team. But, sometimes I don’t always succeed.. I need to keep a more open mind and will try to will be more aware of what I am saying.

So, I’ve been playing around with advertisements on this blog since the beginning, mainly so I could understand what it is all about. Over the last two years I think I’ve made about $20 total. A couple of months ago I put an Amazon advertisement on my sidebar, which did not really do much as it was in a horrible location. The links to specific books seem to work well, as people have bought some books through them.

So, I am always kinda looking around to see what is out there in the internet advertising realm. Recently, Amazon started what it is calling aStore, a way for normal people (as well as people like me) to create a store using Amazon’s product catalog. It’s an interesting idea, so I thought a little while on what I would like to see in a Amazon store, and came up with Coders Haven.

The idea behind Coder’s Haven is simple: out of all the computer programming books out there on Amazon, take the best ones and put them all together on a single page. The best ones in this case are the best books that either I have personally read, or a colleague has read and not been able to shut about it. I think when you look at the set you will see why. The other idea is to change the list out every month or two. So right now the books are decidely agnostic on the whole technology stack. They are more meta type books, and for good reason: I want only the best of the best right now, and these are the best.

aStore is currently in Beta, and it shows. The administration aspects of the store are a little difficult, such as only being able to hand pick the front page items, and then only being able to pick 9 items. I really wanted to hand pick the entire store, but they only allow keyword filtering on the subsequent category pages.

So, go take a look… if nothing else it would be interesting to hear other people’s thoughts on this.