#wjax// #jaxcon People seems like java itself: They are getting older and look somehow tired.

— erhard karger (@cuchulin) November 8, 2011

I really don’t think that’s Java who’s old and tired, neither as a language nor an ecosystem. It’s the people, who not only are looking tired but who are. Well, at least, I am.

I’m a curious person and always eager to learn new stuff but the last 3, 4 years the learning process and the stream of new tools, techniques, frameworks and other stuff accelerated even more than it did in the transition from client/server development to multi-tier-architectures 10 years ago.

At each conference there are new tools. New tools to “get things done”, new paradigms to organize your work and new tools to create stuff. It’s getting real hard to choose and if you want to get your head around the full stack, you’ve plenty of stuff to try, read and experiment on.

The last 2 years saw the coming of so many new languages. Some will vanish, some will stay, but it’s for sure: Another field of learning.

Given that situation plus the stream of information we get the whole day now (tweets, g+, facebook and more) it’s a tiring situation. Most of the people in the talks sit in front of their laptops or have an iPad and are constantly checking twitter and the like. Who wouldn’t be tired?

I really appreciated Adam Beans Talk “Just developed” yesterday. We really need to focus more on the things we want to create and to some extend less on the tools and methodologies.

On a personal note: I am tired. Not because of my “hard” family life with a 2-year-old, absolutely no. I just can’t really turn of my head anymore. The boundaries between work, home and spare time are diminishing. Most of the time it’s a good thing because i can spend more time at home with my family but on the other hand i have all the stuff to think about, to read and to try out often for the late evening and then they are to stay in my head.

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if((foo ? !bar : true))
    if(!somethingelse)
        dosomething()

I don’t want to judge anyone, the thing actually worked, but i really want to understand why people don’t see that this is crap. I’m really aware of the fact, that things tends to organically grow, but how can it be achieved to raise awareness to this fact? I mean, i’m probably only a not-totally-bad engineer, but i see things that will break or are just ugly as hell and i want my colleagues to be more aware of pitfalls.

Would make life much easier and probably more conflict free.

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Nach zahlreichen Konferenzen in den letzten Jahren, u.a. einige DOAGs, werden meine Gefühle bzgl. dieser Veranstaltungen immer gemischter. Ich habe den Eindruck, dass die Schere zwischen guten und schlechten Vorträgen immer größer klafft. Vielleicht eine Folge dessen, dass versucht wird, immer mehr Slots zu füllen.

Bemerkenswert an der JAX dieses Jahr waren natürlich Rails Day an einem Tag, Grails / Groovy Day am nächsten.

Stefan Tilkov hielt einen gut strukturierten Vortrag über REST Technologien im Rahmen des Rails Day. Das, was er präsentierte, hätte von der Thematik auch gut in einige andere Frameworks gepasst, aber trotzdem: Die Präsentation war gelungen. Gute Mischung aus wenigen Folien und Livecoding. Spätestens danach musste dem Zuhörer klar sein, was REST bedeutet. Im selben Track präsentierte Jonathan Weiss “Advanced Deployment mit Rails” in einer Art und Weise, wie ich mir keinen Vortrag vorstelle: Viel zu viele textlich überladene Folien und zumindest fürs Publikum, eine ungünstige Themenwahl. So fiel auch leider das “advanced” weg, was im Rahmen von Fragen wie “Was ist besser, JRuby oder Grails?” (Was ist besser, Apfel oder Birne?) aus dem Publikum wohl auch gut war.

Der Vortrag Rails 3 von Gregg Pollack wurde zwar in einem gänzlich anderem Stil gehalten als Stefans, war aber trotzdem hörenswert: Frei und sicher gesprochen, ohne zu langweilen.

Auch Keynotes können langweilen: Brian Kim von Liferay sprach zum Thema “Architecting your way through recession: an open source survival kit”. Ich habe nicht eine Aussage aus diesem Vortrag behalten.

Im Gegensatz dazu “Fette Maschinen brauchen schlanke Software” von Klaus Alfert, der sehr anschaulich dokumentierte, warum funktionale oder hybrid funktionale Sprachen in den nächsten Monaten und Jahren immer wichtiger werden. Auch er langweilte nicht mit Textwüsten. Passend dazu, Ted Newards “Busy Java Developer’s Guide to Scala”. Ted ist immer wieder das reinste Vergnügen: “What’s your name? – Rüdiger. – Ok, Walther.”

Was ich nicht verstehe, dass teilweise einige Redner augenscheinlich vollkommen unvorbereitet zu einer Konferenz kommen oder aber die Zuhörer mit endlosen Slides, die aussehen wie ein “man ” in Powerpoint langweilen, anstatt Slides zur Motivation zu nutzen und zur Abwechslung einmal frei zu sprechen. Die Vorträge, die mich wirklich innerlich aufgeregt oder mir wörtlich die Augen zufallen ließen, erwähne ich mal nicht namentlich.

Im Gegensatz zur DOAG ist das Publikum auf der JAX jünger und durchmischter, aber auch teilweise deutlich unhöflicher, was jedes Mal bei der Nahrungsmittelausgabe offensichtlich wurde: Sturm auf das Büffet. Oh wie ich es hasse, wenn Menschen komplett alles an Erziehung vergessen, wenn irgendwo kostenloses Essen rumsteht. Generell zum Essen: Liebe Jaxcon Menschen, lasst doch die Gimmicks wie Taschen, Rucksäcke und Zeugs sein und bestellt etwas höherwertiges Catering

Trotzdem, einige nette Gespräche habe ich geführt, u.a. mal ein paar Kollegen von Codecentric kennen gelernt und einen Vortrag von Mirko gehört (Flush and Clear: O/R Mapping Pitfalls), nachdem ich immer noch über die Sinnhaftigkeit eines select distinct nachdenke am manyToOne Ende einer 1-n Beziehung, um das zusätzliche Select zu sparen . Desweiteren traf ich witziger weise einen Kollegen aus Ausbildungszeiten, die Welt ist wirklich klein.

Alles in allem: Eine gute Veranstaltung, 3 oder 4 Tage wären mir aber definitiv zu viel oder ich müsste mir angewöhnen, aus Vorträgen, die mich aufregen, einfach raus zu gehen. Mal schauen, wie es nächstes Jahr wird… Eventuell kann man ja bis dahin DOAG und JAX zusammenwerfen

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Way back in the last millennium i had folders for everything. A folder within a folder within folders. And somewhere buried deep within that, my applications, music, pictures, email and whatnot.

Although Apple does the best a company can going from great to suck, it’s their OS and applications that changed my mind a lot.

I refuse to browse my music by folders. I like it by artist, album or some other arbitrary tag. The same and more for my email. I was used to have a folder structure /private/ and so on… The same for my digital fotos. It sooo much better telling the application “give my all emails from foobar in the last month” or “show me all fotos from the last vacation with me in it” than digging around somewhere in some folders.

Spotlight was the first desktop search i used and after it was stable and performed well after the first view release, it is great. I roughly “arrange” data by themes (i.e. images, programming, music) and put programs in one big directory and i’m done. Oh, remembering my old Windows 95 box with a folder “dos_app” for well… DOS programs and games and a second “win_app” for gui thingies… Hell!

I certainly heard about Windows Future Storage a.k.a. WinFS back in 2003, a relational filesystem by Microsoft which should have been available in Vista but has never made it that far. Today, i read somewhat more and I’m really putting my head against the wall. This thing could have been huge! It’s pity that the problems releasing Vista must have been that big that they (Microsoft) cut their plans of an intelligent file system once again.

After all that Java and Ruby stuff here, i am a database guy, i like the maths behind relations and the power within. Furthermore, this video called IWish Concept Video must be one of the few cool ad videos Microsoft has ever made. Great stuff and i think absolutely possible with all the great ideas in WinFS.

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The best software has a vision. The best software takes sides.

Make Opinionated Software

There’s been a lot of discussion around David Heinemeier Hanssons principle of “opinionated software”. Some people say that “to David, a piece of opinionated software is written in such a way that makes it easy to do things one way and ugly and difficult to do things another way”.

Maybe this approach “with a carrot and a stick” seams odd and old-fashioned, but i think its actually working and because of that, many people don’t like it.

Imagine, you’re using a product you like, you value its creator and especially his opinion and then, something you wanna do, doesn’t work because of obvious arbitrary restriction, you will be pissed for sure.

Certainly not all decisions made with a strong opinion are good, but i think, many of them made boldly had a reason to be done in a definite way and not another, often arising from the same reason you valued the creator of them before.

I’m writing this because i was really pissed when Rails 2.0 came out. It may be sound picky, but in Agile Web Development with Rails” DHH stated: “This fom of attribute accessor looks at the coluumn’s value. It is interpreted as false only if it is the number zero; one of the strings “0″, “f”, “false” or “” (the empty string); a nil; or the constant false. Otherwise it is interpreted as true.”, which means: A convenient method to add a question mark to attribute accessors to query them if they are true or false.

This due to the fact that there is an SQL standard that defines a datatype BOOLEAN but most of the RDBMS do implement them in their own way, most of the time as tinyint constrained to 0 and 1 (Oracle favours “y” and “n” for whatever reason) and so on.

I myself went with “t” or “f” as i can easily memorize it (true and false, obviously, sure, we can argue if i shouldn’t know about 0 being false and all other being true, i do know but the less i need to think about the obvious the more i can concentrate on actually doing something).

So with Rails 2.0 stuff breaks: DHH and the Rails team went with the MySQL approach: 0 and 1 only, 0 is false, 1 is true. This is fine as for example MySQL defines constants like TRUE and FALSE, that although being 1 and 0, conforms to the standard.

As i saw pieces of app failing with the new release (important parts like things being public or not, blocked users and so on), i was angry… “The bad guys destroy my toy” boohoo and i filed this ticket.

After thinking about (and actually changing my enums(‘t’,'f’) to the pseudotype boolean), i think it’s the right decision. As the model existed before i started working with Rails, i didn’t use migrations to generate tables, which is pity as with this decision, i would get the right datatypes in all supported databases. But even though, i like things being conform to a standard most vendors seem to listen to.

Without the Railsteam willingly breaking compatibility and being opinionated, i would have sweared less on the one side but i would have missed the opportunity to do some justified rewriting.

For me it’s ok to be opinionated and a little bit rockstar like, if you got the right reasons. I myself tend to be opinionated enough on my own work but i can defend my decisions most of the time.

It’s not always nice to be corrected and the corrector maybe doesn’t seem like a teamplayer, but i can life with the concept of the “Benevolent Dictator” when the product does the things its expected to do good and isn’t a “creative” mess.

Just in case you haven’t seen the great movie Borat or are totally unaware to irony, i don’t think that software with an opinion and attitude suck.

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“Shut up and watch tv”: Martin Schmitt ends his witty blog as a result §202c StGB that forbids “Hackertools” like wireshark, nmap and co as well as instructions for penetration tests for example.

German Heise News.

The post is well and sad written and i can totally understand him, although i really liked this blog.

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