I’ve been using PHP since early 1996, back in the PHP/FI days.  I’ve used it steadily over the years, sometimes full time and sometimes part time, but that’s been pretty much a primary language for me for 12 years now.  During that time I’ve seen a lot of language changes, some for better and some [...]

Posted in Grails, Groovy, Java, PHP, Rails, Ruby, Web 18 Comments »

Ted Neward does a good job of dissecting a post from Stu @ Relevance on ‘How to pick a platform’.  I won’t repeat everything said in those posts - they each do a better job of representing their positions than I could.  I would take exception to Ted’s comment towards the end of his post:
My [...]

Posted in Blogging, Development, Grails, Groovy, Java, Rails, Ruby, opensource 1 Comment »

I had a good conversation with Joe Fiorini about balancing his daily work in .NET with a passion and enthusiasm for Ruby on Rails.  Have a listen.
 Did you like this post? Buy me a hot chocolate!

Posted in Codemash, Conferences, Development, Microsoft, Ruby, Software, Web No Comments »

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Sun for many moons.  They give us OpenOffice, Java, etc. on the one hand, but then come up with byzantine licensing structures (CDDL was Sun, right?  and SCSL was for sure) and get antagonistic towards JBoss and others on occasion.  Ultimately, trying to ascribe a single mindset to Sun [...]

Posted in Development, Groovy, Java, PHP, Ruby, Software 4 Comments »

If you’re in the Raleigh area and are looking for a job in the web development market, give me a holler - I’ve had recruiters calling night and day.  AND they’re not all calling with the same position.  That used to happen once in a while - I’d have calls from three recruiters that were [...]

Posted in Business, Job, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Ruby, Web 5 Comments »

I had a few ideas from last week that I wanted to throw out here for posterity.
Grahame was talking about Haskell, and I asked if he was going to wait for JHaskell - or Jaskell - before adopting it. We then quickly realized Raskell (a ruby version) and Paskell (php/perl/python version) would be good [...]

Posted in Conferences, Ideas, MySQL, PHP, Personal, Ruby, SOLR, Software, Web No Comments »

I got a question from my brother the other day about why Mandriva wasn’t as well received as a distro.  It’s his primary distro, and was mine for about 2 years.  I don’t think there’s all that much ‘wrong’ with it, but I went to ubuntu about 2 years ago, mostly to ride the momentum [...]

Posted in Development, Java, MySQL, Perl, Ruby, Software, Web, linux, opensource 1 Comment »

This is a general question, but possibly aimed at the PHP crowd more because it’s often easier to cut corners when doing development than in other languages.
“Cutting corners” can mean almost anything from skipping unit tests to skipping documentation to lax variable names to almost anything that you know isn’t optimal but you skip for [...]

Posted in Design, Development, Microsoft, MySQL, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Software, Testing, Tools, Web, opensource 2 Comments »

I attneded the local java group last night to hear Scott Davis speak about Groovy.  My colleague Grahame came along as well.  Scott did a great job of going in to enough detail to show the power of Groovy, without going overboard.  I recorded the event on audio, and may put that up either here [...]

Posted in Java, PHP, Ruby, Software, Web, opensource 1 Comment »

I’m in the midst of learning multiple new technologies, and I think I have to stop, or at least slow down. A personality trait I’ve had for a long time is taking on too many multiple projects at the same time, and in the last year or so I’ve been realizing it gets my [...]

Posted in Development, Microsoft, PHP, Personal, Podcasts, Ruby, Software, Web, opensource 3 Comments »