If you read this post from my Atom feed, it means I migrated successfully my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. If you read this from your Web browser, you are seeing the new design for my Web site.
For some time, I wanted to simplify my blog, both its design and the process to write on it. Wordpress is a great tool to publish on the Web but I wanted something simpler to understand and develop new features for.
For example, I want to distinguish between blog posts (prefixing by a {{ site.linked_list.post }} in the title) and links (suffixed by a {{ site.linked_list.link }}) which mainly redirect to interesting content. There is a Wordpress plug-in for that but I had problems with it every time I upgraded Wordpress. I replaced this plug-in by writing a few lines using Liquid in Jekyll templates. Using static pages only also means that I no longer have any cache issues, Web servers are pretty good at serving static content these days :)
This considerably simplify writing content and updating the web site:
write a post in a text editor using markdown syntax
I also took the opportunity to update the design and layout of the Web pages and I owe much to Mark Reid and James Duncan Davidson Web sites. Everything that looks great on my site is thanks to them, the rest is my own little contribution.
As far as I can tell, all my contents has been migrated and I kept all URLs compatible with their previous forms. If you ever find a page wich is not available anymore, please le me know on Twitter (@jmesnil).
Starting today, I am working for Red Hat as a member of the JBoss AS/EAP team.
I already worked once for Red Hat as a member of HornetQ team, helping to write the fastest Open Source Messaging system and had a blast doing that. However, in 2010, I had a very interesting proposition to join a Web media company to develop Big Data code using Hadoop-related technologies. The job was technically interesting, the team great (I made a bunch of good friends there) but some things were amiss...
Every time I was talking about HornetQ or Red Hat in general, I kept saying "we" as I am proud of my time with the HornetQ team, a sense of achievement that I was not feeling in my new company. I also realized that I was missing contributing to Open Source projects. Having developed both closed and open source projects, I found out that Open Source development is the most satisfying way to write good code and deliver quality features. More generally, I also realized that I want to work for a company whose values I share and embrace. Red Hat has proven many times its dedication to Open Source and its community, its ability to innovate at multiple levels from the operating system to the applications and, of course, the middleware with JBoss. This is a company I was proud to work for and I continued to present HornetQ in various JUGs in France during my spare time (Lyon, Nice, Marseille, Grenoble... Any other French JUG is interested for me to come?).
When I put everything together, it was clear that I wanted to join back Red Hat. And today is the day.
I am changing teams, moving from HornetQ team to AS/EAP team. My job will be to help integrate HornetQ in the Application Server, removing some load from the HornetQ guys and being the man in the middle to smooth out integration issues to make the best messaging system and the best application server work even better together.
I am eager to work on the Application Server code. With AS7, there is a solid foundation which lays the ground for interesting opportunities with a personal interest in entreprise-level services for JVM-based languages, with Torquebox (Ruby) and Immutant (Clojure), and to the Cloud with OpenShift.
Let's put my red Fedora, I am ready to tackle great challenges at Red Hat with my team.
Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone's screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight. A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company's dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.
No, we will not go back to an economy weakened by outsourcing, bad debt, and phony financial profits. Tonight, I want to speak about how we move forward, and lay out a blueprint for an economy that's built to last — an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.
Apple is far from being the only one to profit from outsourcing its production but with its stunning profits, it is emblematic of the failure of capitalism to balance profit with humanity bien-être.
Apple success is well deserved, they have an outstanding line of products and I own many of them. I bought an iPhone 4S during this quarter and it is the best phone (and pocket camera) I ever had. However, I can not accept that someone is woken up in the middle of a night, given a biscuit and a cup of tea and has to work 12-hour to build a device I use sitting in my couch.
We would live in a better world if the companies profits (from Apple and all the others) could be used to create new jobs or at least provide decent working conditions when they outsource their production.
In other words, content! content! content! (as in quality, not quantity).
It's a sad state for Web publishing when I need to use a mix of Instapaper, Readability, Safari Reader to have a sane reading experience without advertisement overload (and unfortunately, I know what an interstitial is...).
One of the joy of working with Open Source projects is when you get an awesome contribution coming out of nowhere.
Jeff Lindsay requested to pull one of his branch of stomp-websocket where he converted all the code to CoffeeScript, added unit tests with a mock implementation of a WebSocket server. This work is a preliminary for more features (including a much-needed support for STOMP 1.1).
When he offered to pull its branch, he wonders if the move to CoffeeScript was controversial and if I would accept it.
stomp-websocket is meant to run inside Web browsers and leverage the Web Sockets API. When I wrote it, JavaScript was a no-brainer.
However I have started to question this choice recently.
I have a pet project where I use node.js and I am making countless JavaScript code mistakes (I was bitten by this one last week, thankfully I have not released my project yet).
As much as I like JavaScript and its related HTML5 APIs, I must admint I am not a good JavaScript programmer and I want a language that helps me instead of trapping me. I started to read about CoffeeScript as a replacement of JavaScript. I find the language more pleasing to read even though some syntax conventions makes it more cryptic than concise.
I am quite pleased with the new code of stomp-websocket in stomp.coffee. It reads much better than the original stomp.js, there are no longer noisy this, that or vars (when they are not missing by errors!).
Rich [Hickey] makes the point that sprinters run fast, but not long. Then he says that Agile "solved" this problem by just firing the starting gun over and over again in quick succession. He grins, and the audience laughs. Then he goes on to say that continuous sprinting does not necessarily makes systems simple, and simplicity is the real key to speed.
That is exactly the issue I have with Scrum and other so-called "agile" methods. It sacrifices long-term design and overall quality for fast short-term hacks. Sometimes there are no shortcuts for long hard work to end up with something simple.
Simple and easy are not interchangeable concepts...
The concept of an address book or contacts feels so lame and dated, it's like 'an address book is this little thing with this faux leather cover!' — Matias Duarte
Touché! The Address Book app is a sore point in the iOS (and Mac OS X) experience.
Address Book on iOS
It is a chore to use this application to update contacts information and the "real life" user interface makes it even more frustrating.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
For all the products and ideas that Steve Jobs delivered during his life, nothing from him has inspired me more than when he talked about life, love and death and what we can do from our life in his Stanford commencement speech:
All my thoughts go to his family, friends and coworkers at Pixar & Apple.
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