I like to have art hanging on my walls.
Not prints. Art. Original art.
I’d rather have an original painting by a completely unknown amateur artist hanging in my living room than have a dozen poster reproductions of Van Gogh, Picasso, Da Vinci or Magritte.
When I was very young (probably five or six years old) I wrote my first piece of music.
I spent several hours thoughtfully sketching out the notes of my composition onto a staff. I gave deep consideration to the pattens of notes in my piece, as well as to the recurrence of patterns and themes within its structure. I wanted to write something with clarity and depth. A thing of beauty.
I poured my heart into this composition, and my final rendition consisted of a full page of a music that I was very proud of. Though I was untrained as a musician at this point, I assumed that my hard work and creativity would be apparent when the piece was played by a competent performer.
A few days later, I went with my older brother to his piano lesson, where I asked his teacher to play my composition. To her immense credit, she gave it her best shot, faithfully playing every note that I had put on the page. And my heart sunk to realize that my composition had no musical value whatsoever. Where I thought I had been writing music, I had really only been drawing dots onto a page.
Have you ever used one of those online reminder services?
Let’s say you have a dentist appointment next Tuesday at 3 PM, so you configure the software to send you a reminder email at 2:30.
Then, if you’re anything like me, on the day of the appointment the reminder note arrives in your inbox and you dismiss it almost thoughtlessly, saying to yourself “Oh yeah. The dentist. I’ll get up and go in a second, as soon as I finish debugging this one function.”
The next time you blink your eyes, it’s eight o’clock in the evening. Not only have you missed your dentist appointment, but also your dinner.
Those of you calendar-savvy readers following along at home have probably noticed that I’ve missed my deadline.
Sunday July 9th was the 30-day mark, and to date, I’ve only posted fifteen of my promised thirty ideas.
Now what?
I’m a few days late to dedicate today’s software idea to Independence Day, but in my opinion, it would still be a fitting tribute.
I’ve always been intensely interested in American politics. I read the news every day. I listen to NPR. I’ve even written letters to the editor of my newspaper and to my congressman.
But the government is so big, it’s difficult to keep track of what’s going on, and I think the public is very poorly informed.
My little brother got married a few weeks ago.
There were, of course, at least a dozen different people taking pictures of the festivities on their digital cameras.
Now the happy couple (and their family and friends) want to see all those photos.
When I was a kid, my family got a Franklin Ace 1000 computer. It had a green monochrome screen, and it booted directly to a DOS prompt (completely compatible with the Apple ][+ platform). It had a few games, too. Off the top of my head, I remember a PacMan clone, Lode Runner, Lemonade Stand (which is surely the root of all my lifelong entrepreneurial ambitions), Montezuma’s Revenge, Space Invaders, and a weird game called Dung Beetles.
Also: Zork
My mom is one of the greatest people ever.
So when she tells me about one of her software ideas, I listen.
In my job, as a software researcher, I do a lot of really different stuff.
All those different jobs require a different workflow. And almost always, a different set of tools.
If you know me very well (or at all), you probably know that I’m not a bit of a framework hater. And the Enterprise Java community is one of the worst offenders in the ridiculously-complex framework department.
So it might surprise you to know how much I love Java, as a programming language. Despite its tendency toward frameworkiness, and despite a few recent warts in the language (autoboxing and generics are both great ideas, but both were implemented incorrectly, adding lots of unfortunate weirdness to the language), I think Java offers a very compelling value-proposition as a development platform.
So I’d like to give a little sumpthin’ back to the community, as my way of saying “Thank You”.
