What it takes to stay happy: More!

We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.

— Charles Kingsley

Recently at the shnit-festival I have seen the brilliant shortfilm "More" by Mark Osborne (better quality on youtube):

More - Funny home videos are a click away

The underlying theme of the movie is a frequent topic on my blog:

Scrum pigs - musing about commitment

Salary vs. Suckage - is there a relation?

Care and Commitment - Don't even get started without them

Job Conclusion

Motivation and Productivity

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Microsoft-ORM: Quo vadis?

For some time things were looking good for Object-Relational Mapping in the Microsoft space... but the tide seems to have changed:

There is the Vote of No Confidence for the ADO .NET Entity Framework (Microsoft is reacting on this with the DP Advisory Council).

And now Microsoft seems to kill their alternative LINQ to SQL!

So what should developers with a decent sense for domain modeling do? I dont think returning to the DataSet is really an option ...

Independent solutions will profit from this uncertainty: Genome, NHibernate, Vanatec ...

We are legion :-)

My colleague Matt started blogging!
He seems to have attracted already some interesting commenters... what a start!

You can find his blog here: blog.rueedlinger.ch

Slowly the bloggers from our business-unit in Bern seem to challenge the blogging predominance from our London colleagues :-)

Of course Matts posts will also be aggregated in my zühlke-stream.

Generic and generated - an oxymoron?

< quick and not well thought out comment >

Last week I was at an interesting presentation.

Some developers were presenting some stuff they were doing with Eclipse EMF and CDO. This was interesting and gave me some things to ponder about ...

But thinking about it I have a big question mark:
One of the marketing-slogans I heard over and over again was in the sense of:

We are doing code-generation, but the cool thing is that it still remains totally generic!

Well, sounds cool ... but ... is generated code and generic code not quite an oxymoron?

If it is generic, why generate it? Wouldn't it be better to refactor it out in a generic component? That's the idea behind Code Generation vs. Code Synthesis.

Is it not the benefit of code-generation to generate highly specific code? Since the code can be regenerated at any time, it is no flaw to be very concrete and verbose, those LOC do not count for maintainability! (I am not the only one to oppose this kind of reasoning, but it is a common argument...)

Once more I had the feeling that I am just not getting the whole Code-Generation-Model-Driven-What-So-Ever-Movement ...

</ quick and not well thought out comment >

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We are all amateurs blindly stumbling in the dark!

Programming has become too complex. I suspect that we have lost it for good!

Here is another evidence:

Look at this blog post by Jeff Atwood about database deadlocks and look at the comments.

The density of contradictions in the comments is just frightening!

Considering that the commenters are probably the upper class of developers out there, it seems a miracle that there are actually working transactional systems out there...

I am not considering me any better at all, a lot of the things the commenters are talking about seems like black magic to me. But I feel terrified by that fact ... thats the basics man! If we don't know how transactions work, how can we start building business applications?

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stackoverflow - let it flow some more!

I am pretty late in joining the choir, but I think stackoverflow.com is an amazing site.

This is the very definition of Web 2.0. Just try it: ask a question and be amazed ...

The brains behind the site are the heavyweights Joel "on Software" Spolsky and Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood.

There are two interesting podcasts with Jeff Atwood, discussing the creation of the site: Herding Code #14 and Hanselminutes #134.

The podcasts reveal some particular interesting facts about the technical realization [see also here]:

The site is based on the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework, which is still beta!

The DBMS is SQL Server 2005

The whole site is running on one server: two quad-core CPUs with 4GB RAM

Web-Server and Database take about the same load

The DB-schema consists of about 16 tables

Basing a heavy-traffic application on beta-technology, thats probably what they call extreme courage.

The server seems quite a lightweight! I have seen enterprise applications with a lot less load that supposedly needed much more horsepower...

I would have expected more tables in the schema... but maybe they were talking only about the dynamic part of the data...

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Java EE: The blue pill of enterprise development?

One thing that stroke me, when I first came across Carbonado was that it was originally developed by Amazon for internal use.

This is another example where a real big boy is not using standard technologies that are brain-fed to foot-soldiers like me out here in the trenches of enterprise development. [Other examples are all the upcoming cloud-technologies: Google AppEngine, Amazon SimpleDB, Microsoft Strata ...]

Sometimes I think I am stuck in some kind of matrix: I am brainwashed that Java EE gives me the right tools for enterprise development. Those tools are not really attractive and provoke a lot of suffering, but hey that's the price for being part of the enterprise!

Strangely, very often I stumble across enterprise-applications, that were entirely developed with those tools in a totally brainwashed and conform way. But they still suffer from exactly the problems that the tools promise to prevent (like performance, scalability, maintainability ...).

On the other hand, sometimes I get a glimpse behind the scenes of the real big boys, like eBay, Amazon or Google... and I get the impression, that there is not much of Java EE there.


I wonder, why might that be? Maybe I should start looking for the red pill...

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