- Jan 8 2009 - 7:00pm
- Jan 9 2009 - 12:00am
- Jan 10 2009 - 11:00am
- Jan 10 2009 - 11:15am
- Jan 13 2009 - 9:00am
andrewgilmartin (Andrew Gilmartin)
Interests
Information Design,
Information Visualization,
Software Architecture,
Software Development,
Software Development Practices
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BlogRecent Content
Title: Github.com's git training (Forum)
Submitted: January 5th, 2009 - 1:39pm
Wave Syndicate is considering bringing in a trainer from Github.com to do some on-site training. (WS doesn't want me deleting the master branch again [1].) The trainer would do a couple of lecture style trainings and then some small group tutorials. The cost is $2250. Is anyone else interested in attending and sharing the costs?
Title: The software IDE and the non-software technical team (Forum)
Submitted: August 13th, 2008 - 10:22am
I very much like integrated development environments (IDE). Like most engineers, I suspect, I scratch a little while using them because they don't work just the way I want. However, the productivity increase is enormous in comparison to the small irritations. Yesterday, I watched the View Case Study: USDA Maximizing Collaboration with NetBeans and Codebeamer presentation. CodeBeemer adds to the NetBeans IDE development collaboration features like revision control, issue tracking, discussions, etc and all surfaced and integrated in the NetBeans approach to information design and use.
This posting is not, however, about software development but about other non-software technical groups outside of the software industry. Do these groups know about these rich tools? I would really like to see a print shop or an archeologist's dig or a municiple planning department use these tools. Perhaps the leap from the common ecology of Word documents + Excel spreadsheets + remote file system is too big a one.
Does anyone have experience with non-software teams using software IDEs to manage their work and materials?
Title: Local Git experts? (Forum)
Submitted: August 8th, 2008 - 10:13am
I have started working with Git for version control. Being a newbie to Git but not to SCM (used and/or administered CVS, ClearCase, and Perforce) I was hoping to find local experts willing to answer the occasional question. If you can help please drop me an email. Thanks.
Title: Stop funding technology startups and start funding restaurant startups (Forum)
Submitted: June 12th, 2008 - 11:42am
I live along the south west cost of RI in the village of Peace Dale. I love it here. URI is 10 mins to the north and Narragansett Beach is 10 mins to the south, but a great meal is 30 mins north to Providence or 30 mins east to Newport. Why don't we have great food here? A geek can not live on dev-tools and info-glut alone. For RI to be a great info-tech and/or bio-tech and/or med-tech and/or enviro-tech hub it needs a broad variety of restaurant food. Let's stop funding technology startups and start funding restaurant startups. Well, maybe we should fund both because a geek can not live without income either.
Title: How does Amazon.com do it? (Forum)
Submitted: June 10th, 2008 - 12:09pm
Service oriented architectures, SOA, has been all over the IT news for sometime now. SOA is a technical practice as well as a state of mind. SOA is usually coupled with the dozens of web service specifications developed at the W3 and OASIS. These are sophisticated specifications and highly inter-referential.
The tools of SOA are growing in sophistication too. They are often open-sourced as the vendors profit from services provided around the tools. Last year, Sun made freely available their full suite of Java based enterprise development tools. IBM and Oracle and others are doing the same.
The upshot is that for a small in-house or independent development team there is a rich environment for developing robust, scalable and loosely coupled applications. But how is it done in practice? Unless you are part of an IT group with forward looking management it is unlikely you are using SOA.
Amazon.com is the most publicly visible of SOA deployments. Many of us use it everyday. A single product page requires a hundred web service calls and yet the page still displays instantly for its ten of thousands of simultaneous users. How does Amazon.com do it?
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Recent Comments
I have not tried Trio or Red Stripe yet. I will put them on the list. I have avoid Spain mostly because everyone says that while food is good the atmosphere -- sound in particular -- is terrible. I loved the Ugly Old Toad and Willy's, both in the same area, but both of these are closed now. The attrotious Canton Island is currently being replaced by a Japanisse resturant. I have my fingers crossed.
My question is partially about Amazon.com and partially about SOA practice here is the biggest-little.
I first learned about Amazon's SOA approach when I read the ACMQueue interview with CTO Werner Vogels. I have been a part of teams that have written distributed systems and so have seen some of the implementation approaches but they were always more tightly coupled than those espoused in SOA. My feeling is that I have not done real SOA yet.Complicating my distributed systems view is Pat Helland's paper on reconciling data distributed within a system. The key idea is that when receiving outside-data you must integrate it with your inside-data rather than simply inserting it. The state of the requesters inside-data is not necessarily the same as it was when the request was made for the outside-data. Further, the outside-data may no longer reflect the state of the sender because it only reflects the state of the sender at the time of sending and not the time of receiving. There is no global consistent state: There is only an advancement towards similar states. A settling down.
My head is beginning to emerge from one client's projects and so I am at a point where exploring new technologies is fun -- rather than the feelings of frustration stemming from being "stuck" with your project's existing technologies. Is the SOA grass greener?