The Real Adam The cult of Adam Keys

Guns, Germs and Steel

Guns, Germs and Steel is one of those essential books that makes more sense of the world. Specifically, it address in rational terms, how it came to be that the modern world is arranged as it is where it concerns the haves and have-nots on the global scale.

The author, Jared Diamond, does so by taking an extremely long view on history, over the course of the last ten thousand plus years). From there he tries to build models and theories that predict why some societies advanced faster than others. To make a long story short, the societies that have become the contemporary first world were able to:

• Move knowledge and technology on an east-west axis, an axis that allows easy migration and translation of farming knowledge because the climate is roughly the same
• Develop immunity to epidemic diseases like small-pox that are tied to living near agriculture, thus making them less likely to get killed off by certain foreign invaders or to kill off natives as they travel to foreign lands
• Organize people into ever-large structures that can sustain invasions, research and other useful forms of specialization

Of course there’s more to it than that. It’s a great read and illuminates all sorts of topics I’d never even thought of, let alone correlated. If you, like me, seek a greater understanding of the abstracts that define the world, this is a book for you.

Use with caution:

That said, with is discouraged in JavaScript. If you can, its better to have methods return self so you can chain like so: people.get_dressed.put_on_music.and_party!

(via)

Most Unwanted Scrobbles - Last.fm aggregates the tracks and artists that people don’t want the internet-at-large to know they listen to. Britney Spears appears twice in the top five songs, along with Nelly Furtado, Amy Winehouse and Avril Lavigne. The Beatles, Radiohead, Britney Spears and Avril Lavigne are the top 5 arists (along with Unknown.)

So I guess Last.fm users are just too damn cool to admit to some of their tastes. Me, I’m fine with letting you know I listened to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Mack Daddy in its entirety this week.

Domain Driven Design

Designing software is a tricky thing. It’s tempting to front-load it on a project. That won’t work because the start of a project is when you know the least about it. So some folks try to do as little design as possible. I’m guilty of this. However, that can lead to software that doesn’t adequately express the problem it’s trying to solve. Further, there is often a temptation to over-design software with lots of ceremony and architecture. Contrary to this is the temptation to not design it at all, which again leads to software that doesn’t express itself.

There’s a book that draws a reasonable compromise between these forces. I’ve been meaning to read Eric Evans’ Domain Driven Design for a while now. The emphasis of the book is in collaborating with domain experts and other developers to find the essence of the problem space and then express that in software (as objects). I’ve often pointed out the utility of building applications from the language up and the problem domain down. DDD focuses precisely on the latter.

One of the core concepts in the book is the ubiquitous language that is used to describe the problem at hand. This language is used by the domain experts (customers) and the developers. The language is then woven into the design of the system. This leads to software that is more likely to succeed, both in business terms and in terms of development effort. Evans spends the first part of the book describing the particulars of this language.

He then moves on to describing the technical side of the software. Entities, value objects, services, factories, modules and repositories are terms I was already somewhat familiar with that Evans gave a more crisp and satisfying definition to. For most people, this is probably the tasty meat of the book, illuminating the way from a competent developer to an outstanding developer.

The last part of the book focuses on the larger scale issues of deep design. I was particularly pleased that he covers how software design is affected by various good and bad social issues. It also gives a strategic view of the forest, where most books on software development focus on a more tactical view of each tree.

I’m fond of pointing out books that are inflection points in my way of thinking about software development. Code Complete, The Pragmatic Programmer, The Dragon Book and My Job Went To India all fall under this category. Domain Driven Design is certainly the latest edition. It makes sense of trends I see in great software and illuminates a path to make software like it myself.

If reading this review didn’t make you want to vomit, you should probably read the book posthaste.

The second part of my interview with David Flanagan is online. This time around we talk about the craft of programming in general. Its good stuff.

Io’s intriguing design

I didn’t manage to touch on this in What Has Ruby Done For You Lately, but Io is a really impressive language. Mostly in the minimal number of concepts one needs to grasp in order to deeply understand the language.

To pick on Java (sorry), a list of concepts you need in order to grasp Java:

• Primitive types
• Objects
• Classes
• Interfaces
• Inheritance
• Iteration
• Conditionals
• Operators
• Type casting
• Generics
• Method calls

I’m sure I’m missing some. Further, that’s just what you need to write a program with one class. To build a realistic system you need to know about class paths, packages and all sorts of arcane details.

In comparison, to build a simplistic Io program, you need to understand:

• Lazy evaluation
• Objects as prototypes
• Short circuit evaluation
• Messages
• Closures

That list ended up about twice as long as I thought it would, actually. Really, all the average practicing programmer needs to learn is prototypes and lazy evaluation.

Io’s guiding design principle is simplicity and power through conceptual unification.

That quote, from the Io Programming Guide, pulls it all together and summarizes why the language nerd in me is quite interested in Io.

OK, here’s the deal. If you’re not watching 30 Rock, you’re not watching the best show on TV. There I said it. Fortunately, you’ve got time to catch up; the show doesn’t come back until October 30th. To whet your appetite, I give you clips summarizing the “lives” of the two main characters, played by Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey.

Google Calendar CalDAV support - instructions for setting up Google Calendar accounts with iCal. Makes Google Calendar a lot more useful to me. Conversely, CalDAV accounts don’t appear to sync with MobileMe. Bummer.

I’m a fan of TaskPaper, the todo-list app that makes sense and doesn’t throw huge amounts of UI at me. Ergo, I’m pleased to see a Ruby library for syncing your TaskPaper documents to what will soon become the web version of TaskPaper. Rawesome.