AjaxWorld and Appcelerator
I am in San Jose this week for AjaxWorld and to meet my new co-workers at Appcelerator. For the conference Appcelerator put me up in the very posh Fairmont. Great room.
The conference it self was pretty good. Worked the booth mostly and only got to see a few presentations. Some were great, other less so. I answered "What is Appcelerator?" more times then I care to guess. That got boring. There was much more variety of topics to cover at CUE.
The folks at Appcelerator are nice. I think it will be fun and easy to work with them. They are very receptive to new ideas which will be a nice change of pace.
Advertise Here... No Here!
I just read an article who's accuracy I cannot verify (or choose not to anyway), but I am all for. Reportedly, Air New Zealand is paying people $660 a pop to shave their head and temporarily tattoo one of their ads to their head. I am all for this.
Anyone want their ad on the back of my head at AjaxWorld in the form of a temporary tattoo? My cranium is available cheap.
Essential Reading for Developers
As I made the rounds on Friday letting some folks know that I will be leaving Lawson one of them asked me what I thought was essential reading for developers. I told him that it was the books we were reading for the book group I started at Lawson.
Upon further reflection this is good information to pass along. So here it is. If you want to write software and you will read (or watch) nothing else, this is what I recommend. It's Java heavy in it's examples but concepts apply to any OO language.
- Head First Object Oriented Analysis & Design
- How To Design A Good API and Why it Matters
- About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
- Head First Design Patterns
- Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern
There are other good reads to be sure, but this is where I would suggest someone to start when they are fresh out of school.
'Stranger Than Fiction' or Why Zach Helm Let Me Down
I really enjoy the movie Stranger Than Fiction. I actually watch it pretty regularly at the moment. Once every few weeks or so. The story is complex for a movie and still intricately woven together so as to not be too complicated or leave too many loose ends.
Everybody in the movie give an excellent performance. Will Ferrell in particular really delivers with a very subtle and nuanced Harold Crick. The direction, photography, sets and editing were just as good. Over all this movie was almost perfect. There is one small problem.
Every time the movie ends I am frustrated by what the movie could have been. Zach Helm, the writer, has written a beautiful script about a writer or fictional tragedy. She finds out her latest books isn't as fictional as she thought. That when she kills her hero in the end, someone in the real world, living the life she has written, will also die.
The story, with the hero dying in the end, is described as her master piece. Powerful and beautiful. She chickens out because she can't bring herself to knowingly kill someone for her art and because she has come to know and like the real live version of her hero. Her master piece becomes just an OK novel when she changes it so he lives in the end.
Fine. Great. I get the story, and it's a good one. It has a happy ending and we can all walk out of the theater with a smile on her face and a craving for high quality baked goods.
If Zach would have had the balls to write the story where the hero dies in the end. Reveal the wake left by what looks like on the surface the life of an ordinary man. To cause everyone to walk out of that theater devastated by the loss of his hero that he so expertly caused us to fall in love with. That would have been a cinematic master piece to rival the literary one in his movie.
Kevin Smith almost pulled the trigger in the end of Clerks when he didn't earn it. Someone talked him out of it and it saved the end of his movie.
Zach Helm, earned it, but he failed to pull the trigger. Otherwise, the movie might have been depressing. Zach, please grow a pair and don't fail to write the hard story. I don't want to be let down again.
Barack Obama Lacks Experience?
I again just heard a Hillary supporter tell me that she is having a problem getting behind Obama because he lacks experience.
When I asked her what experience Hillary had that really stood out to her, she said Hillary's years in the Senate. When I asked what Hillary had done in the Senate that impressed her, she couldn't answer me with specifics. Just that she was there.
Now don't get me wrong. I am not trying to say Hillary hasn't done anything in the Senate. I know she has. But so has Obama. Both in the short time he has been in the U.S. Senate and during his time in the Illinois legislature.
It doesn't take long to find information on the internet about a candidates experience. To find out how they work with the opposition. To find out what they are passionate about. To find out how they achieve compromise and if they can do it without compromising their core principals.
Charles Peters wrote in his column in the Washington Post about Obama's accomplishments. His column started like this:
People who complain that Barack Obama lacks experience must be unaware of his legislative achievements. One reason these accomplishments are unfamiliar is that the media have not devoted enough attention to Obama's bills and the effort required to pass them, ignoring impressive, hard evidence of his character and ability. (more...)
