intertwingly

It’s just data

Versatility is Overrated

David Heinemeier Hansson: The greater the versatility, the higher the abstraction, the less useful for the specifics.

I’m old enough to remember when relational databases were controversial.  Some of the arguments brought forward at those times are very reminiscent of the ones being made today.  Meanwhile David’s The sprint of ideas before release are making me drool, particularly as I had an opportunity to discuss a few of them with David at ETech last week.

Recreational Programming

For recreation, some people like to do NY Times crosswords puzzles in ink.  Me, I like tackling small, incremental, computer programming tasks.  A few years ago, that was Gump, these days it is the Feed Validator.  And until I wrote that sentence, it hadn’t occurred to me how similar those two tasks are: the immediate goal of each is to get consumers and producers talking about interfaces, with the ultimate goal of improving plug and play. ...