There is one thing about my industry that I still find truly amazing (and not in a good way). This is despite the fact that it has happened to me so many times that you think I’d be used to it! I’m talking about non-technical people making technical decisions.

For some reason, it’s a very common practice for those people who don’t have expertise in a certain field to make decisions for people working in that field. The best example I can think of off the top of my head is the answer to the question: “Which technology should we use?”

Let me take a step back in time for a moment.

I’ve recently discovered the joys of CodeKatas. If you’re a geek looking for a way to sharpen the saw then I highly recommend taking a look at these and trying a few out. They’re great fun and they’re a good way of getting your feet wet with new languages (especially if you’re tired of Project Euler).

Yes. You read that right. It’s OK to fail. Yes, I am talking to you. You… that guy who is part of every team. The one who seems to feel the need to be right about everything. The one who thinks that everything new has already been done 15 years prior. The one who believes that every project they have participated in has been a profound success, and that a project-level failure (which includes missing deadlines or blowing the budget) is something they have never experienced. Failure is not only OK, it’s something that you must experience somewhere along the way so you know when you’ve succeeded.

For quite a while I’ve been using my spare cycles to chew over a problem. This problem is not one that hasn’t been solved before, but one that I feel can be solved in a much better way. From the bit of research that I’ve done, I can see at least three areas which can be improved on dramatically. So I’ve decided, after a long period of deliberation, to go ahead and build my solution and release it to the world as a service!

I know, this kind of thing happens thousands of times a day. Some arbitrary geek decided to build the next killer app and expects to make a crapload of cash out of it. While that would be nice, the ultimate goal isn’t the cash. The goal for me is to build something that gets used, and for me to begin to master an area of technology that I’ve had a quiet passion for for a long period of time now.

My plan is simple. While learning the technologies that I will be using I’ll be building another application and blogging about it so that all of you can learn with me. Meanwhile, I shall use my learnings to build this other application at the same time.

The final result should be a series of posts which help other people learn the technology stack, give better coverage and visibility to languages and technologies that a lot of the geek world doesn’t know about (and really should!), and for me to carve myself a bit of a niche here on the East coast of Ozland. I am hoping to be able to consult my services out to other businesses as a result.

For those that are interested in following along, here is the full tech stack and toolset that I’ll be using:

• Erlang - A fantastic cross-platform functional programming language that has some amazing features.
• Webmachine - A HTTP toolkit which sits on top of Mochiweb that makes it easy to build well-behaved HTTP applications.
• Nitrogen - An Erlang-based framework that makes it easy to build websites.
• Riak or CouchDB - Both of these amazing pieces of tech are potential candidates for the back-end storage. I’m not yet sure which one I’ll go with.
• jQuery - A great JavaScript library for the front-end.
• VIM - My favourite text editor :)
• Xubuntu - Ubuntu Karmic Koala with XFCE as the window manager.
• Mercurial - My favourite version control system.
• Trac - A project tracking tool.
• VirtualBox - My choice for virtualisation. I tend to run Windows 7 as my primary OS, so most of my dev will be in a VM. When I get my desktop machine back up and running (with all three monitors!) it’ll most likely multiboot Win 7 and Xubuntu.
• Google Wave - I’ll be using this for communications with some really switched on people in the Erlang community who have kindly offered to help me with questions and whatnot specific to some of the areas of tech I’ve mentioned above.

During the course of my blogging/learning I’ll be focussing on Webmachine, Riak/CouchDB, Erlang and Nitrogen. All the other tools will probably get mentioned along the way, but the primary goal is to focus on these things.

I’m really excited! I’m currently in the process of documenting my goals and the design for the main application. Once that’s done, I’ll get started with the fun stuff. I’ve got a lot to do and it should be a fun ride. I hope you enjoy following along!

For the last couple of years, the server which has powered this site (and a few other sites) has been running the free version of Litespeed web server. After feeling the resource burden of Apache, Litespeed was a breath of fresh air! The fact that the “full” version wasn’t free didn’t bother me, I was happy to stick with the standard edition as it seemed more than capable of handling the meagre traffic that this site generates.

I just thought I’d let the world know that tomorrow night, at 6pm AEST, the Brisbane Functional Programming Group is having another get-together. The topics for the meeting are:

• Introduction to Functional Programming - by Brad Clow
• Haskell 101 - by me!

There are still spots available if you’re keen to come along. It should be fun!

I’m always up for some public scrutiny, so come along and bring your rotten tomatoes.

If you can’t make it, I’ll post the slides for the talk on this site, and on Meetup.com, when the event has finished so you can see what was covered. Feel free to ping me or ask questions.

Update 19th Aug ‘09 The talk seemed to go quite well. I had to motor through the material quite quickly due to the late start, but on the whole I think it was well received. I haven’t had any negative feedback so far ;)

Slides/content are now up for grabs!

This post was inspired by an experience I had recently in an IRC channel. To protect the innocent, I’ll refrain from naming and shaming the channel and individual as those details aren’t important.

Communities are arguably the life blood of technology. Without a good community the likelihood of the technology catching on is drastically reduced. Those communities which lack individuals that are happy to put time and effort in to help get others up to speed tend to stagnate. Any community which involves members that are abrasive, rude and downright offensive is destined to suffer long term.

If you’re not interested in what inspired this post, then skip this section and jump to the more interesting bits.

A Little Bit of History

Recently I’ve been delving into Haskell quite a bit. It’s part of my apparently never-ending quest to learn as much as I can about as many languages as I can (well, those that appeal to me at least :)). While I love playing around with a language, toying with ideas, writing small programs, reading books, blog posts, etc it’s not really the same as having an on-call expert to help and guide you.

A few days ago I was having a chat to a friend of mine about a little data parsing problem. He had the need to parse a multi-dimensional array to pull out some values. That array was guaranteed to be square, but not necessarily in contiguous memory. He needed to parse each “column” of the array, calculate a total, and then determine the biggest and smallest of those totals.

A sample of the data might look something like this:

data = ({150,200,45,57,95,2,45,32,15,10,5,2,2,4},
         12,20,45,37,10,5,2,2,10,95,2,45,32,7},
         32,15,10,5,2,23,24,15,20,45,57,95,0,45})

So the first step would be to add 150, 12 and 32 and store the value. Then 200, 20 and 15, and store the value. Do this for all of the columns, then get a maximum and a minimum.

WARNING - This blog post is long :) This post has been edited since it was published. Please see the end of the article for any notes/modifications

Some Background Info

I had the need to do this for work recently. It was nothing short of a right royal pain in the butt. It was such a pain, in fact, that I have decided to document what I had to do to get it working so that other poor unfortunates will feel less pain if they have to do this themselves.

Almost regardless of the company and the software I’m working on, I use Mercurial for source code control. For the work I am doing at the moment, I was also using hg because the company I am involved with is relatively new and they hadn’t yet sorted out a plan for version control or ALM. It was working quite well and I was pushing all my changes to my NAS box to make sure I had other copies backed up, etc. I was living the dream :)