Opinion
For about as long as my development team has been a number larger than one, I've been on a relatively steady "unit test" kick. With the product I've worked on for over a year gaining more than one cook in the kitchen, it became time to start both writing tests to prevent basic regressions (and save our QA team tedious hours of blackbox testing), but also to automate those tests in order to quickly spot issues.
While I've been on this pretty steadily lately, I'm proud to say that automated testing was one of my first pet projects at Slide. If you ever crack into the Slide corporate network you can find my workstation under the name "ccnet" which is short for Cruise Control.NET, my first failed attempt at getting automated testing going on our now defunct Windows desktop client. As our development focus shifted away from desktop applications to social applications the ability to reliably test those systems plummeted; accordingly our test suite for these applications became paltry at best. As the organization started to scale, this simply could not stand much longer else we might not be able to efficiently push stable releases on a near-nightly schedule. As we've started to back-fill tests (test-after development?) the need to automate these tests has arisen to which I started digging aronud for something less painful to deal with than Cruise Control, enter Hudson.
For the past two months I've been experimenting with varying levels of success with Git inside of Slide, Inc.. Currently Slide makes use of Subversion and relies heavily on branches in Subversion for everything from project specific branches to release branches (branches that can live anywhere from under 12 hours to three weeks). There are plenty of other blog posts about the pitfalls of branching in Subversion that I won't go into here, suffice to say, it is...sub-par. Below is a rough diagram of our general current workflow with Subversion (I've had some other developers ask me "why don't you just work in trunk?" to which I usually wax poetic about the chaos of trunk when any project gets over 5 active developers (Slide engineering is somewhere between 30-50 engineers)).
Via twitter I have been griping a bit about Javascript recently. It's quite possible that I've been complaining about it far more than I complain about other things via twitter, which is a tall order to match.
When addressing something as big and scary as say, a platform built on Javascript, it forces you into looking at Javascript in a way different than how I think most developers (myself included) have looked at Javascript. Most Javascript that I've seen has been hideous. Gobs and gobs of functions and procedural garbage thrown into a series of files that kinda makes sense, but really doesn't. It would seem that most developers charged with writing Javascript don't understand how to write object-oriented Javascript. In fact about two or three months ago when considering topics to discuss in a front-end developers meeting here at Slide, I bit the bullet, raised my hand and said "Can you explain how to do object-oriented Javascript? Because I honestly don't have a fucking clue."
In the past Javascript that I've written has been to compliment existing backend web-application code and front-end code, i.e. I wasn't looking at Javascript as one of the building blocks of my application, I was looking at it as a bit of mortar spread between the cracks to smooth out the surface of the application. The difference in how you start to use Javascript in a web application makes an enormous difference 6 months to a year down the road. How terrible your code (this isn't actually segregated to Javascript) is becomes far more apparent when other developers start to work with your code as well, it's tremendously embarrassing to have to answer questions like "where's the code that generates that one DOM element?" As a general rule, coding all by your lonesome, especially with a tight schedule, will produce less than clean results (unfortunately Javascript is one of the languages I've found where this is more of the norm than the exception).
A lot of what's driven the change from my Javascript being the mortar to being the bricks in my work has been the adoption of jQuery which I highly recommend along with the jQuery.ui library. jQuery makes developing Javascript feel like actual programming, instead of hackish-scripting, which means you'll start to view your Javascript code differently too. Dealing with scoping issues, and prototype-based programming in Javascript isn't all rainbows and butterflies but "doing it right" will help you sleep at night and help reduce the amount of embarrassing questions you'll have to answer to the next poor unfortunate soul that inherits your code.
Some of the resources I've found useful in getting over the barrier to object-oriented Javascript have been:
- This Introduction to Object-Oriented Javascript on the Mozilla Developer Center
- Almost anything John Resig writes, especially gems like his recent post on Simple Javascript Inheritance
- The code included in some mainstream javascript libraries
I'm still not a huge fan of Javascript, but I'm hating it less these days :)
Hate is such a strong word, but I think I can verifiably say that I hate Mac OS X (Leopard). In a past life I wrote Mac software on Mac OS X (Tiger) and everything was wonderful, I enjoyed using Mail, iCal, Xcode, Safari and even iTunes sometimes. I liked using my computer, I enjoyed using the tools handed to me by the gods on high in the mountains of Cupertino.
Now a couple months since upgrading to Leopard certain that everything was going to be even more awesome than before, I type this from my openSUSE 10.3 workstation, running Opera, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Banshee and Gnome Terminals open all over the place. The tipping point was an afternoon at a coffee shop with my lovely MacBook Pro (code named "cherry") when I closed Safari entirely because it was leaking memory, only to open it again for about an hour, and notice that it had started leaking again and in the course of an hour had a memory footprint of 1.3GB.
Using Mail.app in Leopard has been nothing but a complete and total nightmare, somehow Mail.app's internal IMAP implementation can lock up the entire machine causing the Finder, Safari and Terminal all to beachball while Mail.app takes 15 minutes only to end up crashing. Too many stack traces I've watched Mail.app emit have all been rooted in their IMAP support. Thunderbird is also a miserable piece of software, I'm convinced that everybody except the one engineer I know at Mozilla is a complete and utter idiot, but when Thunderbird locks up, I can still use the rest of my system. Somehow Apple has munged the lines between userland and kernel space so much that userland applications can take control of the machine leaving the user on the sidelines while applications compete for resources and bicker amongst themselves.
This has been a whirlwind year for startups across the bay area and my startup, TY-Combinator really is no different. Barely a month into 2008, Slide, Inc announced it had received funding, the recent news about the bid from Microsoft to purchase Yahoo! for just above the GDP of Croatia and now great news for the TY-Combinator.
I'm pleased to announce that the TY-Combinator has received an unsolicited bid from Microsoft that values TY-Combinator shares at over 400% under market value. Microsoft is willing to offer TY-Combinator a half-eaten sammich in exchange for 85% of TY-Combinator outstanding shares. This is an exciting time to work for TY-Combinator, with the prospective addition of the capital Microsoft is willing to offer we will be able to finance new projects to expand our global reach over 1000%, up from our reported reach in the 2007 fiscal year of 1.
Microsoft's bid for a stake in TY-Combinator
Facebook has been pretty nice to Free Gifts in the past, despite originally being a blatant rip-off of the real Gifts application. Prior to today, I have only received one complaint from Facebook regarding Free Gifts practices. They asked me to remove a gift that looked similar to one of their gifts. I was okay with that even though mine was a lemon and theirs was a lime; maybe it was tough for the color blind audience to decipher? Today, I received my second complaint from them, which stated:
I will admit it is relatively the same wording, but they failed to explain how using "Send xxxx a Gift" is deceptive or misleading to users. First of all, Facebook provides a tool tip when you hover over a profile action which says "Provided by the xxxxxx Application," which immediately makes a distinction between Gifts and Free Gifts. Second, as far as I know, users are still sending a gift when they use Free Gifts. Third, I have been using this text for longer than I can remember now with no complaints. With over 50 million gifts sent, I have never had a user say they were "trying to use the real gift" application.
I'm not proud of it, but I do read TechCrunch every now and again, if for only the occasional gem that comes across that causes me to hate buzzwords and everybody that uses them.
In the second paragraph of this article almost caused an entire system shutdown in my central-buzzword-processing unit (CBU):
I couldn't read any further into the article after reading that, whenever anybody uses the word "synergy" seriously I have a tendency to tune out completely and think the absolute worst of them until they offer me chocolates, caffeine or other goodies.
Recently the bank that financed my car switched their phone payment systems over from their more traditional "press a number to do stuff" to a "talk to a computer and try to do stuff" interface, and my reluctance to pay my car payments has increased tenfold.
Before they switched the phone interface, I almost had the correct sequence of numbers to press entirely memorized to where I could press 3-5 numbers in sequence and be done with my "payment session" in under two minutes. Meaning in a matter of two minutes, I could initiate a transaction from my checking account, to send almost $300 to Chase, in two minutes. I hated losing the money, but I loved the efficiency.
Recently however, they've "pulled a Vista" and replaced a wonderfully functional system that "got the job done" with a bloated, slow and buggy system that infuriates me everytime I need to talk to the computerized woman at the other end of the line. A rapid mashing of touch-tone keys on my phone has been replaced with:
PaymentBot: Welcome to Chase Auto Finance!
*pause*
PaymentBot: If you would like to make a payment, say "make a payment." If you would like to check your payoff balance, say "payoff balance." If you would like to blow a goat, say "baaaaaaaa."
Tyler-Unit: make a payment
PaymentBot: It looks like you want to make a payment, if this is correct say "yes."
Tyler-Unit: yes (at this point I'm usually irritated that I've past the two minute mark)
PaymentBot: First I need to find your account, please say your account number or your social security number, or enter them into the phone
Tyler-Unit: *mashes on keys*
PaymentBot: The number you entered was 1-2-3--4-5--5-6-5-4, if this is correct, say "yes."
Tyler-Unit: YES
Where's the call to war to freedom for our fellow democracy seeking people in Burma?
Instead, we should start a war with a country begging for a reason to show off it's developing nuclear arsenal?
What the fuck.
My old life-goal was to get filthy rich and waste it on ridiculous stuff like a t-rex egg, but I think I'll just try to get really rich and start buying Senators.
I remember watching a Channel 9 interview about Popfly with my coworker and former landlord David Young just after the original Facebook F8 Platform Launch back in May, laughing hysterically at a user-interface that used grass as an interface element, but at the same time thinking it was a very cool use of Silverlight as an application platform, instead of a Microsoft reply to Flash. Since that fateful day in May when a Microsoft Vice President of Business Development unveiled Popfly (exactly who should be unveiling a developer tool), I've heard close to absolutely nothing about Popfly, but loads about Silverlight.
Waiting to build a new version of Mono from trunk, I figured I'd check it out again, hoping their ludicrous "private beta" period would have passed, and I could finally use the technology that was unveiled almost 5 whole months ago. Alas, despite having the Silverlight plugin for Safari, popfly.com doesn't support Safari (I thought people wrote cross-platform web pages these days). Admitting my defeat, I popped open my VMWare instance of Windows XP, and Internet Exploder 7, only to discover that yes, Popfly is still invite-only or they're having server difficulties? Despite their about page jokingly referring to themselves as the developers behind products like Microsoft Bob, I'm starting to wonder if they weren't joking, as Popfly's introduction at F8 was either woefully premature or Microsoft decided that a developer environment where you draw lasers in-between boxes that represent stuff is too silly.
I've been thinking and experimenting a lot with MySQL 5, and PostgreSQL 8.3, trying to figure out which database server would be most optimal for scaling larger web applications.
I've brought some of my MySQL optimization tips into a small e-book styled guide, something I hope will help my fellow developers understand what they are getting into before choosing a production environment with MySQL 4, or MySQL 5 in contrast to PostgreSQL.
If you have any other tips for scaling with MySQL, I'll make sure I add them to my little e-book and release and updated PDF file :)
A few nights ago, not knowing what I should hack on and thinking about Andreia's post about her progress embedding XulRunner in a Mono-based Windows Forms application, I remembered something I had heard about vaguely a few months ago (really vaguely, like remembering to turn the oven off after you've already been on vacation for two weeks). Songbird, a Gecko-based media player being touted as the possible Firefox for media applications, and as their site says:
Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions andskinsfeathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.
Feeling curious, bored, and a bit sadistic, I decided I'd give it a whirl on my MacBook Pro. How bad could it be? Besides the fact that they call themselves a "desktop web player" which means god-knows-what, it can't be that terrible, they have an über leet black interface!
It was bad. Very bad.
It's been far too long since I've lobbed a shell in the direction of a good "discussion" on open source licensing, so thanks whurley. I haven't stood on my soapbox/posted here in a while either, what better opportunity to go off on why I don't think the GPLv3 does anything worthwhile and what I think is wrong with nearly every GPLv3 vs. GPLv2 discussion.
I was fortunate enough to be able to go to "OSBC" (Open Source Business Conference) during this past week, I didn't exactly have a badge and I didn't register, I walked right in and snooped around since OSBC was hosted at the Palace Hotel on New Montgomery and Market St (a mere two blocks from Slide offices). It was right there, how could I resist? While at OSBC I met up with my good friend whurley to have lunch, meet some folks, and the usual pointing and laughing at the suits scurrying about. After the meeting a few folks and taking in a lot of what was going on, I couldn't help but thinking:
They know, they know, they know. Not only do they know, they now use it casually the same way they started to talk about "emerging web technologies", the "services oriented architecture", the "power of viral marketing through the blogosphere", etc.
I have struggled to characterize the city of San Francisco ever since first coming out here for a job interview almost a year ago. The city escapes generalization because of the sheer magnitude of intermixing of races, cultures and economic classes, regardless I still am constantly fascinated by San Francisco (that and skateboarding dogs of course). There are two pervailing characteristics about the bay area that I'm noticing already that are only tangentially related, but help make San Francisco the place it is, nobody ever grows up, and it also seems that everyone is a dreamer.
Despite the obvious age differential between some of my coworkers, and the different types of people that I meet either walking down the street or into a bar, I feel amongst my peers. It is uncanny to come from a place like Texas where the lines between young and old are drawn firmly in the dry, cracking soil, to a place like this where the more traditional boundaries between people have deteriorated. As a weird karmic side-effect, almost everybody seems to be perpetually stuck in their mid-to-late twenties.
The youthful exuberance that floods over most of the bay area, and Silicon Valley, seem to be one of the many reasons why the topsoil is so welcoming to startups. Like most starry-eyed young people, not yet jaded by the harsh realities of an unforgiving world, so many people here have a dream to strike it rich. Unfortunately, like those that came to this part of California so long ago for the gold contained in the hills, almost nobody will strike gold. But just like birthday presents to your grandmother, it's the thought that counts.
