It's been a busy week at work. We had three new developers start this week. David and I gave our standard "Here's what XP is and here's why we're using it" speech to the new guys today. I typically use the analogy from the first XP book that compares aiming an arrow at a target downrange (traditional) or steering a car down a curvy road (XP).
But David came up with a really good analogy for XP that I haven't heard before. He said, "Traditional software development is like taking a trip using Google Maps. You print out directions from your starting point to your destination, and as long as nothing goes wrong you'll get there just fine. XP, on the other hand, is like taking a trip in a car with a built-in nav system. In the perfect case, you'll follow the same route that Google Maps would have sent you. But in the event that you get off track or off schedule, the XP nav system lets you readjust and find out 'How do I get to the destination from here?'"
A very illustrative analogy. I thought it was worth recording here, since David still doesn't have a blog.
Hi, all. I'm back from my weekend from Charleston. Had a lovely time, even though I felt like I was walking around a life-sized J. Crew catalog. I would tell you more, but I'm on my way to (finally) see Batman Begins. So more on all of this later.
I got back from SF on Sunday night. Sorry that there have been no updates since then, but my week has been busy. The weekend was killer. I had a great time. We went to some top-notch bars in downtown San Francisco. I feel like I'm really getting a handle on downtown. Unfortunately, I don't really know much about the rest of the city.
Friday night we saw Cleveland destroy the Giants (10-2). I had no particular stake either way, but one of my friends is a violent Dodgers fan and he was thrilled to see the Giants lose. So I was happy on his behalf. I can say, however, that Giants' stadium is really perfect. It's nice, new and clean. It's easy to move around. And it has to have one of the best views in baseball. We were sitting in the upper deck and had an amazing view of the bay and the bridge. It was happy that we'd ended up with crappy tickets — if we'd been sitting in the lower deck I wouldn't have been able to see any of that.
After the ball game, we ended up at The Irish Bank near Union Square. It's down at the end of the alley, and at first glance looked a little sketchy, but it turned out to be perfect. It's an excellent bar — friendly people, good beer on tap, six dozen kinds of whiskey and a killer jukebox: just what the doctor ordered. We stayed there until close, getting lessons on scotch appreciation and monopolizing the jukebox.
I'm on my way up to San Francisco for Jason's bachelor party this weekend. We're going to a Giants' game tonight, then up to Napa tomorrow afternoon, then out on the town tomorrow night. Should be a blast. Talk to you next week!
While everyone's attention was focused on the earth-shaking announcement that Apple will begin using Intel chips starting next year, Apple quietly made another historic change. They have decided to completely open up WebKit, WebCore and JavaScriptCore. You may recall the recent noise from some of the KHTML developers who complained that Apple wasn't giving anything back to the open source community from which they have benefited. Zack Rusin, one of the KHTML developers, wrote:
Do you have any idea how hard it is to be merging between two totally different trees when one of them doesn’t have any history? That’s the situation KDE is in. We created the khtml-cvs list for Apple, they got CVS accounts for KDE CVS. What did we get? We get periodical code bombs in the form of them releasing WebCore. Many of us wanted to even sign NDA’s with Apple to at least get access to the history of their internal vcs and be able to be merging the changes incrementally, the way they can right now. Nothing came out of it. They do the very, very minimum required by LGPL.
I felt his frustration, and I quietly chalked it up as another example of how Apple just doesn't get it — or, at least, is prevented from doing the right thing by Mr. Jobs. I was even planning to blog about it. But no longer. I've rarely been so thrilled to be wrong.
Dave Hyatt, a Safari developer, is the only Apple employee I know who blogs at all about his job. I don't know what kind of special dispensation he has, but I think anyone else in his position wouldn't last long at Apple. But he's clearly a good influence on the company. After the dust-up from the KHTML guys, Dave wrote back asking, "What can we do better?" (Which, in itself, is groundbreaking.) Zack Rusin responded with a list of suggestions. And now just a month later, we have an open WebKit. Well done, Dave.
And look at what they've done. They open-sourced more code. They opened up their internal CVS (well, a copy of it) with full history and comments and everything. They're letting anyone commit. (There have already been a few.) They're hosting a public bug database, a mailing list and an IRC channel. All they're missing is a wiki.
This is the second example I've seen of Apple behaving like an open company. (Darwin is the first. Though I don't keep up with that project, so I don't know how active and involved Apple really is.) Congratulations are certainly in order. I hope that this experiment proves successful and that we see more projects like this from Apple in the future.
UPDATE: I just bought my legit copy of X&Y, partly because the quality of the MP3s I'd downloaded was kind of sub-par. So I re-encoded everything as 320kb AAC and I'm much happier. The cymbals sound like they're supposed to, instead of like static. Also, check this article about the album cover.
I got a copy of Coldplay's newest record last week and it's been on non-stop rotation since. It's really good — like yearly top-ten list good. At first, I didn't really like the single, so I wasn't really expecting much. But I kept finding myself with the chorus to Speed of Sound running through my head at odd times. So I decided there must be something going on.
And it turns out I was right: the album is really amazing. More mature and sombre than their past efforts, but with some great anthems scattered. Favorite tracks so far: Fix You, White Shadows, Talk and The Hardest Part. The record will be officially released tomorrow, so you should go pick it up. I will.
I had a killer weekend — the most fun I've had in quite a while. Here's the rundown:
As previously mentioned, on Friday I drove down to Ventura with friends to hear The Get Up Kids on their final tour. The show was just brilliant. They played a really long set — easily two and a half hours, with the three encores. And the even threw in some tunes from the lead singer's side project, The New Amsterdams. They managed to hit pretty much all of my favourites, including Ten Minutes in the last encore, a song I couldn't help but sing at the top of my lungs. Apologies to anyone standing in my general vicinity.
Well, the real journalist comes through with the scoop. Matt Marshall of Silicon Beat is reporting that Socialtext's Series B (about which more here) weighs in at a nice $3.1mm. Not bad, guys. Not bad. Too bad this broke on a Friday, though.
Here is Ross' post on the matter. He focuses almost entirely on the DFJ angle rather than hard numbers. Which makes sense: DFJ is a big name and they command a great deal of respect. So even though the round isn't huge, Socialtext gains some additional credibility (and no doubt solid connections) through the association.
A few interesting tidbits from Matt's article:
And word is, a large enterprise software company is also considering an investment.
That could be interesting — I wonder who is nibbling.
It's just that all of a sudden, Mayfield will be "hiring a person a week," or so he tells us.
Socialtext has 10 employees right now. They're in the middle of finding real-estate in the Valley. I'm guessing they aim to double by the fall, but I wouldn't expect much more than that. Socialtext's native conservatism would argue against it.
Here is the brief notice in the Merc.
I'll be filling in this post as I think/read more about the news. But at the moment I need to get back to doing actual work.
I've gotten to spend a little more time with Rails this week — only an hour or so. But I think I'm starting to internalize the syntax. When David and I were pairing this weekend, he drove most of the time. Being behind the keyboard has gone a long way toward crystalizing some of the fundamentals in my head.
Also, we bought a copy of the Rails beta-book and as everyone promised, it is well worth the cost. Thus far, I haven't really tried to use it as anything other than a reference — I can't bear to read long sections of book on the screen. But it's been a most useful for finding specific answers. And I'm anxiously awaiting the hard-copy.
I'm going to hear The Get Up Kids tomorrow night at The Majestic(?) Ventura Theater. They're a great band, but unfortunately they're breaking up. This is their last tour. I'm not sure why. I guess everyone has to grow up eventually. But I'm really stoked that I'll get to hear them before they disappear. Also, I've never seen a show at the Ventura Theater before. Jason, who's going to his third Bad Religion show at the Ventura Theater next week, says that it's a great venue. I'm looking forward to it.
Jonathan Nolen 