Jonathan Nolen

Thanks David, for quoting me on the Rails blog. Thanks, Rails folk, for all the traffic and the extremely helpful comments. There is clearly a vibrant community of very smart people coalescing around Rails development (just as Paul Graham would have predicted). I can't wait to dive deeper!

UPDATE: Bob Woodward's article on the Deep Throat revelation.

This is outside my ordinary purview, but it's not every day a mystery of this magnitude is revealed.

Vanity Fair published an article today claiming that they had ascertained the identity of the near-mythical Deep Throat. Now the Washington Post (for whom Woodward and Bernstein wrote) has confirmed the story and officially acknowledged the identity of the Watergate informant, previously known only to Woodward, Bernstein and their editor Ben Bradlee.

Bonus link, via Kottke: 1992 article from the Atlantic Monthly laying out the case for Mark Felt as the informant.

If you, like me, spent far too many of your formative hours playing Zork on an Apple II, you will find this hilarious. For those of you who are too young to know what I'm talking about, you'll have to trust me. But you really missed out.

Warning: spoilers for the Lost season finale.

Well, my first weekend, actually. I spent most of the long weekend diving into RubyOnRails with David. Rails is the hot new framework developed by David Heinemeier Hansen of 37Signals (whom you may recognize from earlier praise) while he was building 37Signal's first application, Basecamp.

Rails has been making lots of noise in the developer community lately: people are claiming enormous increases in productivity over traditional Java development. Even Justin Gehtland, author of Better, Faster, Lighter Java, who has a lot of great things to say about reducing the complexity of the average Java webapp, is a Rails fan.

And after this weekend, I can now say that I'm a Rails fan as well. You can do so much with such little effort. We got big chunks of a sample application written (signup, login, list items, pagination) in 205 lines of code. Add to that 240 lines of tests. (How cool is that? We wrote more test code than functional code. That's gotta be a good sign!) Plus 283 lines of template code — and there's a ton of refactoring we could do there. So 728 lines of "code" (if you count the HTML) and we're probably a third of the way through version one of our sample app.

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UPDATE: Sold 'em!

I'm trying to get rid of 4 tickets for the KJEE Summer Roundup concert at the SB Bowl on 6/11. (Featuring Jimmy Eat World, Rise Against, Pepper, Hot Hot Heat, The Bravery, Tegan and Sara, Pinback and the Mad Caddies.) I bought the tickets a few months ago, but now I'm going to have to be out of town that day. If you're interested, drop me a line. I'll cut you a deal.

Dave Winer (a difficult figure with whom I agree and disagree in equal measure) has a great article about Apple's arrogance and insularity.

Both Apple and Google will soon be under assault, it seems certain, by larger competitors who have let their people blog. To think they can afford not to be present in the arena of the present (not just the future any more) is the kind of dangerous naivete bordering on hubris that could make them lose their competition, by default, by not even showing up.

Yet more support for what I wrote about Apple here and here. Apple will not change so long as Jobs is at the helm, but perhaps someday they'll gain more freedom to be human.

O'Reilly's Radar (I still love that name) has a great post about attracting developers to your platform. It was a follow up to this piece on launching an Open API, which is equally insightful.

All too often the company is so tied up in its existing business that its idea of an "open API" is 10 hits/day, strictly non-commercial use, SOAP-only, with fax-in paperwork only downloadable with the latest version of IE on Windows. They're looking at the API purely from the point of view of the provider. But if you want me to use this API, you'd better start thinking about it from my side: I want something that's easy to start using and that will scale with the coolness of the apps I build.

Damn right. Having recently tried to use eBay's developer program, I can tell you how important ease-of-use is. In this case, I spent a hour filling out various forms and waiting for emails and clicking confirmation links, only to figure out that I couldn't even attempt what I wanted to do because that feature wasn't supported in the Developer Sandbox. Most frustrating.

I appreciate that eBay is trying. And I'm grateful that they're willing to partner with outside developers. But they've clearly missed the boat on making it easy for casual developers to jump in and do something cool.

My goal is to see something interesting with an afternoon's work. Your job is to make your dev program and API easy enough for that to happen.

Safe and sound. It was a long drive for a quick trip, but worth the trip. Met some great folks. Had some fascinating conversations. Went to three cool bars in one night. Not bad for 16 hours! Thanks again to Alicia and her most tolerant roommates.

I fully recognize that my posting rate has been decidedly wanting of late. All apologies, but real life has gotten real busy all of a sudden. But don't worry, it's all good stuff.

I'll be in San Francisco on Monday and Tuesday, staying with Alicia. I'll back in Santa Barbara on Tuesday night. If you're in the bay area and want to get together, ring me up.

I really hope to be back this week with something interesting to say. Maybe I'll get a chance to tell you about the concerts I saw today. Short version — they kicked ass. We'll see how it goes.

You can either open up, and we can all flourish together; or you can remain closed, and die alone.

From Ben Hammersly. Read the article.