Mark Roseman's Blog

Smalltalk.

Ok, Remaking Smalltalk is not exactly an article I'd expect to see in the Globe and Mail. Nothing terribly exciting in it, but just not what you'd see in a more mainstream publication. Neat.

Move Coming Up.

We get possession of the house in Guelph in a couple of weeks, and do the actual move about a week after that. We were over there this past weekend (the current owners had a garage sale) and all looks great - really looking forward to getting in there. And I'm sure Pauline is really looking forward to ditching the commute.

Scalable web sites book.

Just started reading Building Scalable Web Sites by Cal Henderson of Flickr. While I'm not now or anytime soon looking to build the types of truly large scale applications/sites that this book is concerned with, I picked it up because I though it would make for an interesting read. It's (so far in my reading) very much a practically oriented "experience" book, rather than presenting the One True Methodology that You Must Follow. As I said, not directly applicable for me or I'd figure most others, but an interesting perspective, and there's sure to be many tricks relevant for other situations too.

Progress is more fun.

With the hosting transition behind, and everything apparently working well, I've been able to focus a bit more on development for the next software versions; already there is a ton of new, though mostly incremental, things that have made it in. Other than a few smaller things in the last version, this is the first real "new stuff" version since 4.7, over six months ago. Just getting over the psychological avoidance of the Tclkit upgrades that was the 5.0 release was very liberating.

Nice to get rid of some of the small annoyances that have been hanging around for a while, and removing a few bottlenecks. Reminded again how gratifying performance tuning can be... test runs slow, find problem, make code better, test runs faster, the world is an infinitesimally better place. What more could you ask for?

Also gotten a few nice thank yous from customers and other users the last few days about answers to their questions. Spending the time to work with customers in this way has been very rewarding. Certainly one of the attractive parts of a "lifestyle" software company for me is being able to do that sort of thing. It can definitely be a tradeoff, and I most certainly wouldn't suggest that every developer should be doing things this way. But for me right now, it's definitely a very good thing, and I'm glad I've got the opportunity to do it this way.

Murphy's Law.

Never fails. Have spent a bit of time the past week setting up a new beefier server for the hosting services, but hadn't quite finished up everything when the existing setup decided to develop severe hardware problems (for the first time in the three years its been running) which led to more than trivial amounts of downtime. Couldn't cut over to the new one without losing data, so that had to wait. All has been successfully moved over now, so with any luck it'll be smooth sailing for a while longer.

It was also convenient that Blogger (which I'm using for weblog publishing for, say, announcements about service disruptions), happened to have a problem affecting some users during that time too, and lucky me, I was one of them. Add in some power outages at the home office from thunderstorms yesterday (new UPS installed now, the old one was getting a bit weak), just for a bit of fun.

Now back to the previously scheduled work, which was actually going well...!