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The key to Cringely’s argument [...]]]> A couple of days ago I was sent a link to Robert Cringely’s latest treatise:  The second coming of Java – and to say I disagreed was a bit of an understatement. To me, it represents a fundamental flaw in his perception of developers, and more importantly the economics of software development.

The key to Cringely’s argument comes down to this:

When SSDs gain enough capacity there will be a shift from the Ruby world back to the Java world. Not for prototyping, because, well, it’s prototyping. But simply because the statement “Ruby is incredibly slow but I don’t care because my database is slower” will no longer be true.

What he’s missing here is the real reason people use frameworks like Rails; it’s not about it being Ruby, or being the latest cool thing – it’s about developer productivity. That’s it, and that’s all there is to it – Rails allows a developer to do more in less time. That’s one of the key reasons so many Java web developers jumped ship (though I can think of a few others), and what pushed Microsoft to invest so heavily in their MVC framework.

I could fully rehash the argument, but in what I consider to be one of Jeff Atwood’s best articles,  Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive, he covers a key point to my argument – developer time is vastly more expensive than hardware. Atwood’s take on the issue is clear:

Clearly, hardware is cheap, and programmers are expensive. Whenever you’re provided an opportunity to leverage that imbalance, it would be incredibly foolish not to.

When there’s a choice between developer productivity, and spending money on hardware – the conclusion should be the same. It’s much cheaper to throw more hardware at a slower framework than it is to invest more developer time in a faster framework. For any non-trivial application, throwing more front-end servers at it will always be cheaper than slowing the development process down with a non-productivity-centric toolkit.

It’s simple economics; server hardware is getting faster and cheaper, developer time is only getting more expensive.

#embedly_twitter_14054401{background:url(http://a2.twimg.com/profile_background_images/71955358/DSCF0658.jpg) #C0DEED; padding:20px;} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 0px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} #embedly_twitter_14054401 .embedly_tweet_content{background:#fff;padding:10px 12px 10px 12px;margin:0;min-height:48px;color:#000;font-size:18px !important;line-height:22px;-moz-border-radius:5px;-webkit-border-radius:5px} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p span.metadata{display:block;width:100%;clear:both;margin-top:0px;height:40px; padding-bottom: 12px;} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p span.metadata span.author{line-height:15px;color:#999;font-size:14px} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p span.metadata span.author a{line-height:15px;font-size:20px;vertical-align:middle} #embedly_twitter_14054401 p [...]]]> Earlier today, a rather surprising tweet hit, being retweeted at least 80 times, including by a few rather influential people in the .NET world:

Needless to say, that’s not an announcement that anybody was expecting, but given the talk going on at the time – and the high-profile people talking about it, there wasn’t much reason to doubt. Announcing a product that has been dead for years is going open source would certainly be a strategy shift for Microsoft, but does it make any sense? Kevin Dente of Herding Code fame certainly thought that Microsoft had better things to release:

Shortly after the initial tweet, Doug Seven, the Director of Product Management, Visual Studio Tools & Languages, replied asking Roy Osherove (the original poster) to email him. Hmm, it’s starting to smell like something odd is going on. A couple of hours later, Doug set the story straight:

To which, Roy then tried to unset:

It’s worth pointing out that Roy Osherove currently has a full ten-times the followers that Doug Seven has, meaning his altered retweet was seen by more people (at least initially). For several hours word was going around, and accepted by a number of people who thought Microsoft was actually going to open the code to VB6 (including journalists who were too busy writing articles to do any fact checking) – all based on one person who made it all up.

Lesson here: be careful about what you re-tweet, it’s easy to endorse a lie as several people unwittingly did today (@blowdart summed it rather well).

This obviously isn’t all that helpful, nor did I find anything all that useful on Google – thankfully the issue is easy to solve. [...]]]> On my fresh Ubuntu 11.04 box running Ruby 1.9.2 instead of the standard Ruby 1.8, I ran into some undocumented errors while installing the mysql2 gem. Here’s what I was seeing:

$ gem install mysql2
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing mysql2:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

        /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 extconf.rb
          <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require':
          no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
	from <internal:lib/rubygems/custom_require>:29:in `require'
	from extconf.rb:2:in `<main>'

Gem files will remain installed in
  /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/mysql2-0.3.2 for inspection.
Results logged to
  /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/mysql2-0.3.2/ext/mysql2/gem_make.out

This obviously isn’t all that helpful, nor did I find anything all that useful on Google – thankfully the issue is easy to solve. All that’s needed is to ensure that the following packages are installed:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev libmysql-ruby1.9 ruby1.9.1-dev

Then you can try installing the gem, it should work, hopefully

To make things easier, I used Platform Pro by Pagelines (a great platform IMHO) and so used their “deep [...]]]> While building a new website for a small ISV, I was asked to integrate a forum – should be simple I thought, I’ll just use WordPress as a CMS and bbPress. Simple? Not quite.

To make things easier, I used Platform Pro by Pagelines (a great platform IMHO) and so used their “deep integration” instructions (while they are intended for Platform Pro users, the steps are virtually identical for all other setups). While the setup went quite smoothly, it wasn’t until it came time to test user registrations that the issue came up: when a new user tried to register they would receive an error stating that “email is required,” even if they had entered a valid email address. This effectively made it impossible for users to register, and thus made the forum useless.

After a bit of research, it looks like there is a conflict between newer versions of WordPress (3.0+) and bbPress 1.0.2 (I’m not sure if older versions have the same issue, but I would assume so). The fix for this is actually quite simple: install a plugin. The plugin itself is quite simple – containing only around a half-dozen executable lines of code, and works around the issue with a simple hack.

Unfortunately, the plugin description is rather vague and required a fair bit of research to identify as the fix, and the official documentation makes no reference to the issue or that this plugin can be used as a workaround.

Overall, a simple workaround but a major issue if you don’t notice that it’s broke (as is quite easy to do).

If you are using Dreamhost’s PS offering (a managed [...]]]> I recently had an idea for a small web application, and seeing as I’ve not spent as much time as I’ve wanted to using Rails – I opted to build it the latest version of Rails. A decision that caused far more grief than I expected.

If you are using Dreamhost’s PS offering (a managed VPS for those that don’t know), the seemingly simple task of getting a Rails 3 application up and running is actually quite complex. The root cause of this is that Dreamhost’s OS image is based on Debian etch, which was released in April 2009 and has since been replaced; which means etch has become fairly outdated.

Here’s the process I used, and so far it seems to be working quite well:

Domain Setup:

When adding your domain to the Dreamhost panel, you’ll want to enable Passenger.

Once your application is uploaded to the server, you’ll be greeted with a particularly unhelpful error message (something like “uninitialized constant Bundler“) from Passenger (or perhaps just a 500 error page).

Server Updates:

This is where the work starts, and gets somewhat ugly. As a warning, it’s quite possible that you could damage your configuration doing this; though thankfully you can restore your server to a working state within a few minutes from the Dreamhost panel should something go wrong. You’ll also need to have an “admin user” for this task, as much of what needs to be done has to be done as root.

First step: Get your PS up to date; even after performing a restore on my server, there were a number of updates that are available to be installed. So let’s start off by getting those out of the way.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get -f install

Once you get past those three commands, the next step is to update SQLite to the latest version, as the version Dreamhost uses is quite old and won’t work with Rails 3.0 (well, to be accurate it won’t work with the latest version of sqlite3-ruby, which is the default database provider for Rails 3).

wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
tar zxvf sqlite-autoconf-3070400.tar.gz
cd sqlite-autoconf-3070400
sudo ./configure --bindir=/usr/bin --libdir=/usr/lib
sudo make
sudo make install

If you don’t update SQLite you’ll get an error like this:

sudo gem install sqlite3
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb
checking for sqlite3.h... yes
checking for sqlite3_libversion_number() in -lsqlite3... yes
checking for rb_proc_arity()... no
checking for sqlite3_initialize()... no
sqlite3-ruby only supports sqlite3 versions 3.6.16+, please upgrade!
*** extconf.rb failed ***

or if you install the updated version, but don’t force it to /usr/lib you’ll get an error like this:

sudo gem install sqlite3
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing sqlite3:
	ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb
checking for sqlite3.h... yes
checking for sqlite3_libversion_number() in -lsqlite3... no
sqlite3 is missing. Try 'port install sqlite3 +universal' or 'yum
install sqlite3-devel'
*** extconf.rb failed *** 

Once that is taken care of SQLite, the rest is easy.

sudo gem update

At this point if you visit your new Rails site, it should be working!

Notes:

1. I’ve not tested this extensively, and I’ve no idea if this breaks anything. All I can say for certain, if that all of my sites still work, but your mileage may vary. <Disclaimer />
2. I was a fairly early Dreamhost PS adopter, and part way through this process I reset my server to get it back to a clean state. After resetting, I noticed some differences with the behavior of apt-get (404s on update and upgrade are gone), so for other early adopters it may be necessary to perform a reset to get your servers configuration in-sync with the latest official setup.
3. I can’t say for a fact that this is completely necessary, though you’ll likely need to selectively update a few packages if you skip this step. Also, for me, gem was broken until I ran sudo apt-get -f install.
4. Special thanks to Matt for helping me get this working; troubleshooting the SQLite install was more than a little time consuming.

Immigration Law: [...]]]> The company I work for is hiring several developers which marks my first significant hiring effort since being promoted to management. This had led to a few interesting observations* I would like to share that may benefit both those looking for a new job and those looking for the next star to add to their team.

Immigration Law: I had no idea how complex this area of law gets; it’s a maddening maze of rules and policies that are more effective at confusing those involved than providing a reasonable solution to a problem. If you run into this (and you will), you need somebody that has dealt with this and knows what to do. Getting both parties into legal hot water is far too easy.

Resumes: I’ve seen great resumes that made it clear that I needed to hire this person and resumes so cluttered and complex it took an hour just to get through it. Here’s a few things that stuck out to me:

• DRY is good for code, and for a resume. Clean and concise is always better; if you find yourself hitting Ctrl+C even once while working on a resume, you’re probably doing something wrong.
• Length is important, but shorter isn’t always better. Unlike many other fields where a single page resume is considered optimal, technical resumes need at least a second page. Going too short on a resume is a great way to blend into the crowd; a resume should stand out, and that takes space.
• How long is too long? Unless you’ve been doing this for a very long time, more than three pages is probably excessive. This isn’t always true, but think it through before using more than two pages.
• Use whitespace carefully. Don’t leave a page half empty or pack everything in so that it looks cluttered. As with any type of design, whitespace is a powerful tool that should be used wisely and never be left to chance.
• Use color sparingly. Many corporate printers are black and white only, so if you use color make sure it looks right when printed without it.
• Use bold even more sparingly. It’s sometimes useful to point out items of interest, but it quickly degrades the readability of a resume.

Many people seem to have a hard time with this, but a resume is a textual representation of yourself. It represents you as a person and your accomplishments as a professional. Any errors or signs of haste or carelessness say much about you as a person; if you are careless with such a significant representation of yourself what does it say about your attention to detail or work ethic?

Experience: For a person that has recently graduated, experience in the field is the single largest hindrance both when it comes to securing a position and to receiving a salary they are happy with. The best advice I can find for people in this position is to look to the open source community for help. There are many projects that are desperate for developers and it’s a great way to get familiar with working in a team, coordinating with people over a distributed area, and releasing code for public consumption. In lieu of paid work experience, open source is a great way to fill in a resume (and it can be quite profitable for some, if you play your cards right).

Salary: In some companies pay is a minor issue thanks to clearly structured systems such as that proposed by Joel Spolsky; for others is can be a source of pain, envy, and jealousy. This is a topic that I truly hate; it’s uncomfortable at best and quite painful at worst. While I can’t offer much advice, here are a few things to think about:

• Money is not an effective motivator. In an ideal environment it should just stay out-of-the-way and allow developers to live a comfortable life; in reality the role it plays is a bit different. More often than not, it’s a distraction that gets in the way and outweighs the factors that do motivate people.
• Companies follow a few different pay systems, and once set moving to different system is nearly impossible. Here are a few I’ve seen:
  • Clearly Structured: This system places developers on a scale, and developers at a given level receive the same salary (see Fog Creek).
  • Structured + Negotiated: This is the most common system I’ve seen; it mixes a structured level system with negotiated modifications that can apply a certain percentage increase from the normal base salary for that level or other benefits (extended vacation, etc).
  • Negotiated: Pay is based on negotiation skills and need; this can lead to odd situations such as where a junior developer can make more than a senior developer due to the need to fill a position quickly. This system requires strict secrecy when it comes to salary information to avoid nasty surprises, unlike the clearly structured system where salary information can be openly shared.
• Are large salary increases possible? Some companies have no issue with large increases in salary for a promotion (20%+) while in others exceeding 5% for any reason is a major challenge. If a developer is coming in on the low-end of the scale (i.e. due to lack of experience, such as a recent graduate), is there a real possibility of moving up? In my experience, people stay near the end they start at – those that start at the bottom will stay there until they move to a different company.

Interview Questions: If you are conducing an interview, make a list of questions and write them down. It’s quite embarrassing to suddenly realize that you are out of questions just a few minutes in (Need inspiration? Try this or this). Many people have said much about this, but the most important thing I can point out is just don’t wing it. Plan carefully, make sure you know what you’re going to do and when before the candidate shows up.

Interview Dress Code: I’ve been amazed at what I’ve seen people wear, everything from high-end suits to jeans. What’s appropriate? It really depends on the environment; a large corporation will expect an Armani suit where a startup is happier seeing jeans and an American Apparel t-shirt. When in doubt, I would go with a suit personally – but depending on the company that could cost you the job just as quickly as showing up in jeans.

Interviews Go Both Ways: An interview shouldn’t be a one-way affair; the candidate should be interviewing the company as much as you are interviewing them. They should be asking questions about the environment, expectations, tools and resources provided as much as you are asking them about prior experience and knowledge. If a candidate doesn’t seem to care about the company or what the working conditions are like – think carefully before hiring them.

Other Thoughts: I’ll not go into what I look for when it comes to personality or other personal traits as that would require far more than a blog post to cover. I’m also going to avoid things such as hobbies and the like; while they can tell you much about a person they can also lead to other complications. Any question in an interview can quickly lead to a land-mine and in the legal quagmire that is HR law and policies, trouble is easy to find. When in doubt, just don’t ask.

* This is based on my experience over the years; not necessarily the experiences in this round of hiring or the opinions or policies of my employer. In general, nothing in this refers to policies, preferences, or procedures of my employer. <Standard Disclaimer />

Though the tools needed for development seem to be public, I’ve yet to see the end-user run-time; [...]]]> It looks like the core Silverlight 3 tools are now available:

• Microsoft Expression Blend 3 + SketchFlow RC
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 SDK
• Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 Tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP1
• Deep Zoom Composer

Though the tools needed for development seem to be public, I’ve yet to see the end-user run-time; though I imagine we’ll see that in the release anticipated for tomorrow.

Time to have some fun.

Update: Client run-time is now available.