Lonely Lion

Remember that post a few days ago about how I quit Twitter and Facebook?  That lasted all of one month.  Why?  Well, I’m still pretty firmly quit on Twitter, despite the fact that I’ve registered a new name, but Facebook really sucks you back in.  Not for any of the things that make Facebook Facebook, like social graphs, and reconnecting with people you really don’t want to reconnect with, it’s because of all the areas of the internet that Facebook has co-opted.  The specific reason was because of a real-world archery group I belong to that only posts information, important information, like scores in an ongoing league, to Facebook.  Why do they do that?  Because Facebook is easy.

I can’t blame them, Facebook has the momentum of 25% of the internet, and has become the de facto way of organizing everything.  In the early days of the Chicago Python Users Group, there was an outcry when we started organizing the meetings through meetup.  I thought it was ridiculous, because, really…who cares?  You create an account, you RSVP for stuff.  No big deal.  The same argument is being used for organizing activities through Facebook.  The difference is, I didn’t have to constantly maintain and prune my social graph on meetup.  It was a single-use thing.  I would use it to RSVP to meetups.  That’s it.  Facebook comes with a significant amount of baggage.  Facebook is the new social graph monopoly, and it’s difficult to have any sort of networked life without an account there.

During my month away from the big two, leaving the networks came up in conversation a few times.  It was mostly an admired, wished for act.  People genuinely sympathized with leaving the networks, and pined for the act themselves.  Then they’d get quiet, and look almost scared, because leaving the networks means cutting ties with the growing number of groups that only organize themselves through those two networks.

The most common complaint I heard, “/Twitter|Facebook/ makes me constantly evaluate what I’m doing right now, and makes me thing how I can phrase it in a /Tweet|Whateverfacebookcallsatweet/.”  I agree completely, and despite my re-joining the big two, I’m not going to go back to thinking that way.

Quick edit to add a link to a NYTimes piece that sums up a lot of what I was thinking when I quit: I Tweet, Therefore I Am.  In particular, this quote: “a part of my consciousness had split off and was observing the scene from the outside: this was, I realized excitedly, the perfect opportunity for a tweet.”

Hi,

Just a quick note to say that I’ve left Twitter and Facebook. Both are nice sites, with lots of good things to say about them, but I didn’t want to be on either of them anymore. The only real explanation I can offer is that I’m a luddite anachronist (a word that I made up) who wants to remain social, but in more specific ways.

What does that mean? Well, I haven’t shut down my flickr, chess.com, google buzz, and threadless accounts, so it’s not that I’m anti-online-social network. Just not into twitter and facebook anymore. Deleting my accounts was really a non-event, given the small size of my respective networks, but it’s come up a few times, so I wanted to let folks know that I’m a-ok, just off twitter and facebook.

Email me. I like email.

Sometime over the summer, Wilbur (my adorable two year old son) and I started playing around with Garageband.  I’d record him saying something, or banging on the keyboard, and then lay down some Garageband loops underneath it.  He liked sitting on my lap at the computer and listening, and he especially liked banging on the keyboard.  So, for Christmas, I upped the ante and asked Santa for a MIDI keyboard and a fancy Novation Launchpad to control a entry level copy of Ableton Live.  We’ve been playing around with both things for a bit now, making a series of really terrible songs.  Clearly, we’re driven by process rather than product.

I’m going to start posting our masterpieces here, to this award winning blog.  So, seriously, get ready for some hot trax.  This first hit is called “Par-Tai”.  It was recorded this morning at 6:30 am, while we let Camri sleep in a bit after a particularly hard night of Wil waking up every hour.  If you hand Wil a microphone, chances are he’ll say “Par Tai”.  Which is how he pronounces “Party!”  It’s adorable, and guarantees that he’s going to rule the par-tai when he gets older.

Just before the holiday break, I left PSC and accepted a job at skinnyCorp the parent company of Threadless. Like most good things, there’s a little bit of sad in there for flavor. In this case, I left a group of people that I respected and loved working with. I learned a lot at PSC, and am grateful they gave me the opportunity that they did.

I’m really thrilled to be at Threadless, I’ve interacted with them for a while now, so the move felt right. I joined as the VP of Technology, inheriting a sterling group of tech awesome dudes from the equally sterling Harper Reed. The job means that this blog will most likely stray into topics that I haven’t written about in the past, exciting process-y management-y type topics. One of the advantages to working at a place like skinnyCorp is that their company is an open book, as evidenced by their Threadless365 project, so I’m confident that I’m not going to be giving away any top secret information.

2010 is going to be a good year.  I’m resolving to tweet less and blog more.  Or…really…tweet the same, and blog more.

Last week I gave an Amazon EC2 presentation at the Day of Cloud conference here in Chicago. My slides from the presentation cover some basics about EC2. It was a good day, lots of good speakers, and lots of attendees that were interested in getting their apps into the mysterious clooooouuudd.

The kicker is, I spent a fair amount of time explaining how to set up a relational database on EC2, just in time for Amazon to announce that they’re releasing very easy to use MySQL instances. Luckily, I have a half hour tomorrow at the Chicago Google Tools User Group to revisit the Amazon talk. I’ll revise the talk to focus on Amazon’s new offerings, specifically how to get a reasonable web app up on Amazon using RDS as a database back end.

I understand the irony of giving the talk at a Google tools group, but it can’t hurt to know how to move your applications off of AppEngine and on to other services. It’s all part of Data Liberation, right?

Now, with video:

I’ve been involved with a handful of EC2 deployments at PSC, and they’ve all ended up with a custom AMI. Basically, starting up an existing base Ubuntu server, installing and configuring packages, and saving the new image as a custom AMI. It’s not a bad way of doing things, but I had a nagging feeling that there was an easier way. Especially given the ease of deploying an AppEngine app. Granted, they’re two completely different animals, but still…there had to be something better.

Eric Hammond, of Alestic fame, answered a bunch of my nagging subconscious questions with the release of runurl. Now, you build and host your configuration scripts, and pass a list of the scripts to run on server start up through passed user-data scripts. In theory, it’s possible to start up a new base server, and automate the build out through hosted scripts. It means slower start up time, but significantly less configuration and AMI maintenance. For a webserver cluster, where you have some time to get new nodes up, this method makes more sense than the standard AMI-saving method. Nice work Eric!

Well…it’s either a game changer, or it will end up being really popular in Brazil.  I’m leaning towards the game changer.  Really, it’s about time, it’s good to see a big company being ambitious instead of just making a new thing that’s just like the old thing, and they’re open sourcing it.

Imagine a big cast iron pot, throw in Appengine, XMPP, Blogs, Wikis, stir, simmer, and serve.  Wave!  Some particularly interesting bits from the API preview doc:

You define the behavior of your robot by defining the events which you wish your robot to be notified. Wave contacts the robot whenever one of these events occur, such as a change made to a wave in which the robot is a participant.

I spent an absurd amount of time hand crafting an email-bot a few years ago that could respond to my old improv team’s email list with information about our upcoming shows.  It ended up being pretty useful, but took a bunch of time to write.  Anytime an announcement includes robots, I’m hooked.

The Java and Python client libraries allow you to design your robot

Python!  (Note to Google, please rewrite the above to read: The Python and Java client libraries.)

Lastly, there’s a Chess gadget!

Obviously, the real test will be adoption.  I signed up for sandbox access, because it feels like this is the future, and I want to support it.  A slew of my non-technical friends now treat Facebook (nice, but a non-open standard) like it’s email.  As a consultant I’d love to be able to suggest modern collaboration tools that don’t tie you into one particular vendor.  And most importantly, Wave looks like a heck of a lot of fun to play with.  Although I haven’t released anything of any importance on Appengine, I love the concept.  The Appengine deployment process, applied to collaboration, seems like a real win++ to me.  Nice work Googlers.

Remember that whole Appengine got the JVM link I posted yesterday?  I forgot to add one thing.  Rhino is on that list.  Meaning, you can write really awesome Javascript applications on the Google-server.  In Ted Leung’s Pycon talk he specifically points out the performance gains that several big companies have baked into Javascript, how Javascript is one of the most “known” languages, and how Python & Ruby folks should know that as soon as Javascript becomes an accepted server side language, they’re probably going to have to join or die.

Obviously, I’m paraphrasing.

That said, picture Ted as a crazy prophet saying that when the sky rains blood, it means the end of Python.  Then picture Google Appengine raining blood.  See where this is going?  Google totally released server side javascript on Tuesday.  The prophecy is coming true!

(If you watch the video, feel free to skip over the Q&A period, in which I ask a batshit crazy question and blame democracy for the inability of Python to feed more families.)

I’m often heard to mutter, “The JVM is the future man…if you’re a Python or Ruby developer, you should really get up on it. It’s the future.” Google agrees with me (it isn’t the first time, they’re constantly hitting me up for advice). They released the JVM for Appengine complete with a fancy Eclipse plugin.

Although the majority of the documentation talks about the release of Java for Appengine, there’s an important distinction to make…they reallly released the JVM for Appengine, as evidenced by this nice post about which JVM languages will work on Appengine.

So, really, in one swoop, they released Jython, JRuby, Scala, Javascript, and Clojure. That’s pretty slick.

Sure Java is arguably way less nice than Python and Ruby, but the JVM is pretty great. Languages that target it as a platform open up a lot of otherwise closed Enterprise doors. If you want to write Python or Ruby as your day-job, you should really start paying attention to the JVM.

Pycon 2009, as of 2pm on Friday, is the best Pycon I’ve been to yet.  The talks this year are really well put together, it’s clear that the speakers are high caliber and spent time on their talks.  Despite the lower attendance numbers (thanks Economy!), it feels like Python is poised for some significant growth.

The Python VM panel, with representatives from Jython, IronPython, PyPy, cPython, and the relatively new Google-cPython-speedup project-unladen-swallow, is laying out a future for Python the language points pretty clearly at “Python is an objectively good language, let’s get rid of this silly implementation idea.”  Meaning, developers want to write Python, and they want it to run everywhere, and they want to leverage other tools, regardless of origin language, in their language of choice, which…thankfully, is Python.