Ryan Tomayko

Doing It Wrong —

Tim Bray on the state of Enterprise tech:

This is unacceptable. The Fortune 1,000 are bleeding money and missing huge opportunities to excel and compete. I’m not going to say that these are low-hanging fruit, because if it were easy to bridge this gap, it’d have been bridged. But the gap is so big, the rewards are so huge, that it’s time for some serious bridge-building investment. I don’t know what my future is right now, but this seems by far the most important thing for my profession to be working on.

That’s what led me to start (the now defunct) lesscode.org almost five years ago. Things actually seem to have come a long way since then, when the idea of using open source, dynamic languages, or web protocols would get you laughed out of the room. That’s not the case anymore.

I’ve given up the idea that advocacy can have an impact, though. Everyone has something to pitch The Enterprise. You get lost in the noise. Useful tech wins eventually.

More Developers, Less Code —

I never put it together that the teddziuba that wrote at lesscode.org in 2005 was that teddziuba. This is a great piece.

My rules of thumb for developers: less code —

Rafe kicks off a series detailing various aspects of his coding philosophy. The first is near and dear to my heart: less code

Maintainable Programmers —

This was a really great lesscode.org piece by Aristotle. The follow-up discussion in the comments was superb as well. Being in the middle of everything really warped my view of what was going on back then, I think.

Mistaking Cons for Pros —

chromatic on million-line Java programs: “I can only imagine how much larger the Java code would be without all of those XML files.”

What if powerful languages and idioms only work for small teams? —

“What if closures and meta-programming and expressive type systems and annotations and all of the other tools that give us the power to build powerful abstractions actually don’t scale to larger teams?”

The ESB Question —

This is a scary description of a small chunk of my tech career: “In a previous life, I helped develop ESBs. I’ve written about them and I’ve promoted them. But somewhere along the way, I lost the religion.”

Obie Fernandez : Ruby on Rails and More... —

“I’m not really much into evangelizing Ruby and Rails much nowadays. You know, since we won, I have to admit that it became boring and besides the point.” :)

Less is more for Ruby on Rails, inventor says —

“We’re not trying to bend Ruby on Rails to fit the enterprise, we’re encouraging enterprises to bend to Ruby on Rails,” he said. “Come if you like it, stay away if you don’t.”

Is anything ready for the enterprise? —

“I would rather take an easily modifiable, open platform that I can make do what I need in a specific environment.”

Software Development: Simplicity tops the agenda [infoworld.com] —

We won on my birthday :)

J2EE SUCKS HUGE DONKEY BALLS. —

“Then they spend one day debugging shit that’s gone wrong with Eclipse (or its mangling of the CVS repository, or some ant dependency problem, or)… And meanwhile they whine that 256 megs of RAM isn’t enough to edit a fucking text file (and do NOTHING el

The top 20 IT mistakes to avoid —

w00t! lesscode bringing in the tail….