When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I want to write more on this subject but for now I’m putting this out in the universe to remind me.
Philip Greenspun has a post that has caused a bit of an uproar in the Rails community. You have to scroll down quite a way to get to the moral of the story. Actually you have to scroll all the way down to the comments.
The point of the story was to show that the MIT-trained programmer with 20 years experience and an enthusiasm for the latest and greatest ended up building something that underperformed something put together by people without official CS training who apparently invested zero time in exploring optimal tools. Could some team of Rails experts have done a better job with mitgenius.com? Obviously they could have! But in the 2+ years that our MIT graduate worked on this site, he apparently did not converge on an acceptable solution.
and
I like this story because (1) it shows the fallacy of credentialism; a undergrad degree in CS is proof of nothing except that someone sat in a chair for four years…
From a business perspective; in a day and age where most of MIT’s CS catalog is available online for free in addition to a vast supply of other sources, why would you employ someone who payed $40k+ for a chunk of sheepskin with a fancy script font to build your next killer app or architect your environment? Likewise to the programmers of the world; why would you choose to work for someone so rigid and unimaginitive they’ve never questioned the “BS in CS or related” heuristic? One has to question whether such a hiring manager is interested in results or appearances.
Relational databases are meh. There are sexier storage technologies out there for web development like document oriented and object databases. Still the relational database is often the day to day workhorse of most of our projects.
Just a moment ago I had to decide what (relational) database to use to back a project I’m working on. I’m going with PostgreSQL. There are a lot of good reasons to use Postgres for this particular project; It’s already installed and configured, it has good features and standards compliance, and it’s free.
I’m wondering how other people and organizations choose their databases. It seems to me that Oracle and MySQL are often chosen by default. I’m not sure that is a reasonable default or merely name recognition.
More importantly to me recently is; should I be working with those ‘default’ databases in order to keep my skills current for potential employers or should I be using PostgreSQL? I’m thinking I’ll keep my PostgreSQL and possibly even work more with those sexier storage technologies mentioned above. I want to work with the cool kids so I should do what I perceive the cool kids to be doing.
Maybe I’m just a fanboy….
—R
My contract which expires at the end of the month (Mar. 2009) is not going to be extended. That means that I will be out of a job. Lots of people have asked me lately what I’m going to be doing with myself and what my plans are.
The Plan:
I’m taking the money that I’m making now and putting it towards essential bills in advance. Rent, capoeira, phone, internet, github, gas, electric are on that list. Less important and daily useful things are getting cut. That means no gym membership or linode for me.
I have already started looking for new work. I have my consulting company and one or two other head-hunters also looking on my behalf. If you know of anything interesting going on my linkedin profile (http://linkedin.com/in/rjspotter) or my twitter (https://twitter.com/rjspotter) are good places to get a hold of me.
I’m going to be contributing more to opensource. Plan to see a lot more activity on my GitHub account.
I’m going to be testing out a couple of ideas I have for general consumption. I’m planning on deploying to Heroku (http://heroku.com/).
That’s it for now.
—R
This could get interesting
Edit: I received my invite and I’m starting to use it.
I suddenly realized why blogging and specifically tech blogging are important. It’s practice for the business communications that you have to do as a geek.
That my friends and neighbors is the question. I could implement what I’m working on presently using either related tables and maybe some single table inheritance. Alternatively I could implement it using ActiveRecord’s composed_of functionality. So far I’ve done the latter. I was looking at prototyping the former.
After some consideration I’ve come to the conclusion that the data that I’m working with is not well formed. I’ve been told that the relational model is only good for highly structured data. I’m tending to believe that.
I’ve looked at document oriented databases. Now I need to prototype this application using one and figure out how I’m going to work the politics to get it to production should it work.
Still I’m curious… What *is* the relational model good for? It seems that we (the development community) use it for everything.
—R
I’m getting stuff done again. Lots of work with ActiveScaffold & Dr. Nic’s Magic Models. Hopefully in the near future I’ll have the chance to work with ActivePresenter and acts_as_wizard.
—R
Sometime during vacation I seemed to have lost the code groove. I had it a little while I was on the train earlier today. Unfortunately I ran out of battery.
I’m pretty sure this is just my schedule being too full. When I sit down to code I tend to marathon as is espoused by “Holding a Program in One’s Head”. No big blocks of time means no programming.
I’m hoping that after my dinner party tonight and capoeira tomorrow I’ll be all groove like for this week. There’s a lot of stuff I’d really like to write but I just don’t feel it when I sit down at the keyboard.
—R
I give you Mediocre In Place Controls
Basicly I needed to work around the use of the calendar helper in Super Inplace Controls.
—R
If like me you’ve been frustrated trying to get Dr. Nic’s Magic Models and ActiveScaffold working together Here’s your ghetto patch
—R
