Vacation Books and Screencasts

I am looking forward to spend another vacation mostly under water.

For the travel and the time above the water I am filling my Kindle and my iPad with the following material:

Thanks to bertolami, mbaumeler and j_graber for the recommendations.

Presentation: Can JavaScript be elegant?

Last month I was invited again to speak at the SBB Developer Day 2011. Here is the presentation I held about JavaScript:

 

Kann JavaScript elegant sein?

View more presentations from jbandi

I enjoyed the event very much, and I hope to be invited again next time.

Opinions: Scala

Can you spot the difference:

Scala is a serious option for organizations developing on a JVM platform.

- Martin Fowler

 

 

The friction and complexity that comes with using Scala instead of Java isn't offset by enough productivity benefit or reduction of maintenance burden for it to make sense as our default language.

- Yammer moving from Scala to Java

 

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Model, model thou art my riddle!

Can you spot the difference:

In a Model View Controller application, you only ever want to see SQL code in the model.

-  Rails Receipes

The domain model should be independent of persistence implementation details.

- Domain Driven Design and Development In Practice

Probably we should accept that models come in different flavors...

... or maybe the grand master was right:

Using C means that people [...] don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap.

- Linus Torwalds

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Watch out: The world is changing!

Lately I seem more susceptible to realize how fast the world is changing. Probably I am getting old...

At a recent lecture, Martin Herdina (CEO, Wikitude) showed how the mobile phone changes our lives (and he displayed slides you don't usually see in lectures…)

Once again I realized that the iPhone was only launched in 2007. I think it is amazing how our use of technology can change in only 4 years ...

Another striking example underlying the perception of technical change in relation to other areas of our lives:

What crosses your mind when you see the following picture?

Old-school, clumsy, clunky, retro …

...at least that are impressions that pop up in my head…

 

Now, what crosses your mind when you see the following picture:

Cool, highlight, milestone in movie history, top-10-movies of all times, re-defining science fiction movies …

...again that are my personal associations.

 

But you remember that the Nokia 7110 phone in the above picture was actually designed after being inspired by the Matrix movie:

 

I think it is remarkable how time is not having the same effect on movies as on technology. The Matrix definitely aged better than the Nokia phone.

In context: Great video about living in exponential times.

 

 

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Dysfunction: Headhunters & Short Time Contracting

I blogged before about the desolate state of our industry.

Here is one clear symptom underlining once more that there is something wrong:

Regularly when a government IT project here in Switzerland has an open vacancy for some months, I am getting calls, emails and XING requests from headhunters from Germany and the UK that want to mediate me for this job.

There is so much wrong in this setup...

For a start, the whole setup represents the idea that constructing software is like putting bricks on top of each other to build a pyramid. You can hire some more hands and you will finish sooner, because once a brick is laid, somebody else can put the next brick on top of it. This analogy is completely wrong (and that is not an expression of the unprofessionalism of our industry)!

On the other hand what does anybody expect when he goes through headhunters like this (I even have seen cases where several hierarchies of headhunters were involved)?

Do develoers think they don't get jobs without them? Do employers think they do get better developers through those headhunters?
What added value does a headhunter provide in this case? He hardly even looks at my CV, which is online anyways, and...? The employer wants to do an interview with me anyways, and the headhunter does not provide any guarantees, does he?

The result is that another layer of indirection is introduced that legitimates just another bureaucratic overhead. Headhunters like this are neither interested in the project nor in the developers they mediate.
Also (probably as a consequence) developers recruited in this manner usually are not very committed to the project. Why should they? The next recruitement is already waiting around the corner...

I strongly believe we should stop this headhunter/short-time contracting in IT projects. Hire developers for goals not time-periods. Cut the middle-men and get developers committed and responsible.

Further reading:

• Recent Thoughts On Hiring and Being Hired
• Headhunter tries to recruit DHH (funny comments...)
• 5 things that are wrong with recruiters! (Update 2011-11-29)

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Tidbit: Lines of Code

According to a claim in the Non Relational Data Stores Panel, the query parser in MySQL alone spans 100'000 lines of code in C and the whole Cassandra Database is 30'000 lines of Java.

I don't know what to deduce from that, but it is certainly interesting.

Some directions of thought:

• Java is a more powerful language than C
• MySQL is much more sophisticated than Cassandra
• NoSQL databases are much less complex than relational databases
• ...

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