Archive for June, 2008
Open Letter to The Blogging Microcosm: give me content, not school fights!
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.
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Job Openings
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:
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Current Obsessions, June ‘08
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.
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