What should happen is that the spokesperson for the avant garde -- not an appointed position -- should take a set of CPAN modules/versions, best-practices, etc. and wrap it up into something that can be easily installed by a novice. And then pitch it to the community, affix a clever name to it, write a book, etc.
]]>I will add that being involved in a large code rewrite is also an excellent way to commit job suicide. I was phased out of my last job primarily because I bet the farm (at least my part of the farm) on a very complex architectural standardization effort. I enthusiastically followed what the team leader and a very prominent developer on the team wanted us all to do, which was as intricate and modern as perl5 can get. I chomped the bit and then got way in over my head while most everyone else continued working on incremental improvements to running systems.
As with working on any large project that does not have immediate business value, many aspects of a rewrite can attach a huge target around your neck. The political situation became as complex as the rewrite and I believe that putting all of my time into the rewrite (without hedging) -- and then defending my decision to do so -- ruined my position there.
In most organizations, a high-risk project like a rewrite might not be worth participating in unless you can get significant and provable buy-in from other developers on the team, not to mention political coverage from managers across the company. And if the support wanes, I would advise any developer stuck knee-deep in a rewrite to get working on something that is practical and much-appreciated.
Otherwise, the whole exercise can lose you your valuable time and energy, your mental well-being, your job, and even the friends that you made on the job.
Beware.
]]>The demo code processes a small corpus of financial filings and is modelled after Jeffrey Dean's and Sanjay Ghemawat's original paper on MapReduce, entitled MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters.
Also, here are the slides on sideshare:
A2PM: Gearman Talk by Jamie Pitts
10/27/2010 @ 7:00 PM
118 S. Main Street, Ann Arbor
Workantile Exchange conference room (http://workantileexchange.com/)
Some of the decision-makers are aware of their discriminatory behavior, others are in denial. Often it is the nature of many engineers (who may find themselves in a leadership position) to also have a somewhat diminished sense of empathy, and this adds to the potential for all sorts of discrimination to occur.
Whatever its origin, this nasty environmental factor is not going to away without some serious social engineering. We can exploit it, or cope with it, depending on where we are in life. We can also try to kill it. And we should, because we are only getting older. If enough people change what they do, we can all collectively benefit.
Sort of like planting trees in our neighborhood.
Ridiculously, I first felt age-related discrimination when I was only 25. More recently, I watched one partner in a rapidly expanding tech company tell an unemployed 55 year old developer (who was asking about what kinds of people the company is looking for) that the company was looking to hire young grads from the university. While this was at an informal gathering of developers, the insensitivity of it was palpable.
But sensitivity does not help a tech company survive. The young programmer possesses a naivete and a drive to learn that is prized, and at a low price. The old programmer possesses an equally valuable experience level, but at a high price. The advantages and disadvantages of each are clear, but short-term answers to cost contraints rule over the long-term benefit of experience.
This is because experience can be learned, and naivete cannot. Usually.
If you are an aging programmer, get into the habit of unlearning. Stop being good at something old, and start being bad at something new. Take on what seems to be a stupid, newfangled technology that does not appear to be a better solution than the older solution (that you happen to know inside and out).
Let go of your advantages. And plant a tree or two.
]]>Having cut his teeth in NYC finance tech, Mr. Schachter built del.icio.us in perl. I saw him speak at a Ycombinator startup school and this man is the quintessential Wall Street engineer: practical, tough, direct, and funny as hell. It is obviously too soon to tell whether he will use perl to build parts of his new venture, but he probably won't be using anything like Yahoo's php+c++ framework.
]]>But WTF is this talk about beleaguered status? I've been through the java jungle and ruby rockstardom and I've never been so fired up about a technology as I am about perl right now.
]]>It isn't correct to think of WordPress and a theme as separate entities. As far as the code is concerned, they form one functional unit. The theme code doesn't sit "on top of" WordPress. It is within it, in multiple different places, with multiple interdependencies. This forms a web of shared data structures and code all contained within a shared memory space.
Ah, yes, how wonderful, a web of sharing between you, your lawyer, and a lamprey with seventeen heads.
The WordPress community could use a good dose of TIMTOWTDI as embodied in MT's approach to contributions (and in perl in general).
]]>I went to a lot of talks and found out many interesting things. Here are some tidbits:
Ok, well, that was day one. I'll add more tomorrow...
]]>These subtle changes should put me in much better form for the upcoming YAPC 2010!
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