I totally read it on Some Guy’s Blog

Mark Shuttleworth gets it.

I am hosting a Richmond Geek Dinner in one month, June 22nd, 2006 at The Bull And Bear Club in downtown Richmond.

There will be free wine, provided courtesy of Hugh MacLeod and his 100 Geek Dinners in 100 Days program, which looks like it may reach its numbers shortly as of this posting.

For those who have expressed concern about the price, please visit the first link about this dinner. The Bull And Bear Club does have a dress code, but it is not an expensive place to eat, necessarily. There are many sandwhiches and chicken dishes available for less than $10. Presumably, this is how much a dinner out would cost you.

Even before vacation kicks off (so I can try to build up my collection of blog postings once more), I wanted to get a post out there about how I’m feeling about the technology transition I’ve been making recently.

From Java…

I recently wrapped up the bulk of my involvement with the job I had before I started at ALTERthought. I’ll still be available for training and consultation purposes. I no longer have weekly visits scheduled. I’m not responsible for getting anything implemented, etc.

That in itself is a good feeling. I am proud of the product I produced. The project is being maintained by a developer who had no exposure to Java whatsoever 6 months ago.

What I have a good chance of remembering as clearly as anything else is the last feature I added. It took me about six weeks of calendar time to implement something I felt that I could have done with Rails in about two days. To be clear, there were false starts, and I only got to work on the project for a couple of hours at a time.

It makes me sad to think, like a best friend from elementary school, my most pleasant days with Java web development might be gone forever. If we meet again, it likely won’t be in the best of circumstances. My old friend will have been on a two-year bender, hanging out with shady programmers who maybe aren’t out explicitly to corrupt him, but perhaps they just don’t know any better. But perhaps it was all my fault! I would never call on him to go out to the bar with me, where we would used to talk about how we wanted to change the world. Very sad, indeed.

Rails and AJAX

Rails is getting my calls, these days.

I’ve gotten a lot of exposure to the AJAX and Rails mixture recently, and it’s one powerful combo. Rails has server-side elements that make AJAX easy to use (like RJS templates) and view elements (e.g. form_remote_tag and link_to_remote) that also make it easy to integrate Prototype-based AJAX calls without worrying about “how to do” AJAX. There’s this feeling I get as I dive more deeply into Rails that once I work with Rails as much as I have with Java, that the (ed. note—the rest of this sentence is lost forever.)

For the record, this project will be at one person week on Thursday, and is already five use cases deep. I’ve also completely rearranged the domain model twice. A similar change on a Java project will probably take me a few months calendar time to get right.

I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly. And try not to get too depressed in the part of the journey, because there’s a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can’t motivate your staff to extraordinary measures. So you have to keep your own spirits up even though you well understand that you don’t know what you’re doing.

from Andy Grove via Guy Kawasaki and Bob Sutton

I’m in a position at work where it’s time to grab my hardhat and get to the work of managing. The complication is that the people I’m working with both, technically, outrank me. I’m building a hedge fund at work, which is a project which plays directly to my strengths and education.

We’ve faced some recent difficulty, however, and I’ve seen enough to believe that the best solution is for me to make sure that my beliefs get out there. I think my concerns are the most useful match with the external shareholders, and fortunately I think that a little more rigor is what the project needs. So it’s time to step up. This is playing directly to my weakness. I like my hubris well-contained normally.

The above quote really resonated with me, and I hope it’s right, because that’s exactly what I’m trying to do.

My longest absence ever from the blog, more than a month and a half. I can only say that I was needed elsewhere. I’ve been reminded recently about how I used to post about the smallest things, like the fact that it’s so much easier to appreciate Lennox Lewis’s career now that the heavyweight division is horrible. But these thoughts wither and die as I’m on my way from one place to another and I just haven’t gotten them up. Fortunately, or unfortunately, no one cares anyway. But, anyway, at least the drought is over now.