For many years, I sometimes thought I might stay at Nike until I retired entirely. Quite a lot has happened over seven years I’ve been here and it has been the most rewarding career decision I ever made to join this company. However, it is with mixed emotions that I have decided to move on to a new opportunity. On June 21st, I’ll be joining the amazing engineering team at HubSpot.

Update: unfortunately, the Safari Books blog no longer seems to be around, so the following links are all pointed at their Archive.org copies. Recently I was asked to write a few posts for the Safari Books Online blog. They were looking for Scala content, so I suggested Akka as a central theme. I wrote these posts with an audience in mind that hopefully would have been exposed to Scala (or could, at least, read a short Scala tutorial), but who had not yet written any Akka code.

The other day, I found myself in a series of discussions with some fellow developers, in part about the performance characteristics of large numbers of threads in a JVM running on a Linux system. While I would not claim to be any sort of expert on the subject, it was clear that some of the information I had thought was fairly well known, was not nearly as pervasive as I assumed.

A couple days ago I was playing around with my Emacs configuration a bit and decided to see if I could find ways to make it a more direct part of my flow (whatever the hell that means). For a quick sample of sorts, I threw together this little hack that let’s me popup a quick Emacs window with a buffer that’s already running haskell-mode (I assume here that you already have it installed, if not, you can find info on the haskell-mode page).

DorkbotPDX 0x01 will be taking place on March 30th at the PNCA Graduate Studios building (1432 NW Johnson St.). Doors will be opening up around 6 – show up early if you want to meet other dorks or find out what makes us tick. The lineup of speakers is: Cathy Swider - Using LEGO Mindstorm NXT robots with students to create art Ward Cunningham - What If Bacteria Designed Computers? David Frech - Bootstrap yourself into conviviality by writing your own Forth Talk Descriptions: Using LEGO Mindstorm NXT robots with students to create art.

I’m not big on resolutions or anything, but sometimes I feel it’s good to draw an arbitrary line in the sand in order to make changes you’d like to see in yourself, your life or whatever. So here’s a few thoughts on what I’m going to take a stab at doing in 2008. Maybe none of these will work out or maybe they all will, who can say. Some of them are just half-formed ideas afterall.

Greg Borenstein has put together a list of 50 blog posts he’d like to see in 2008. His theme that drives the list is “I know Ruby. Now what?” I see at least a couple in there that I could probably write a few useful sentences about, so maybe I’ll have to give it a shot. What I really like about this list is that there are a number of ideas in there that could be written up in fairly short posts while still saying something worthwhile.

Here’s a little tidbit that took me somewhat by surprise. I was poking around on my laptop trying to debug an issue with a Ruby library I’m trying to use. I ended up trying to find the man pages for the TCP socket API. Not the Ruby interface, but the native stack. The thing is, the Ruby TCPSocket class just wraps around the native implementation. But when I tried to find the man pages, they weren’t there.

So, a friend of mine asked me to put together something that would update a particular twitter account every so often with content from a text file he sent me. Of course, anyone who has spent more than 30 seconds playing with twitter4r knows how simple this is, but I thought I’d post the code here just for posterity. It’s not doing anything fancy whatsoever. All it requires is a text file with the posts each on a separate line and a twitter.

This is a review I wrote on Amazon for Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran. I decided I should post a copy of it here for safe keeping. I hope to write a more detailed review of it at some point, but we’ll see how far that idea gets. I first learned of this book just a few weeks ago, shortly before it was available. I immediately read the sample chapter on the publisher’s website and was certain I had to get a hold of a copy.