Software Architect

"Contributors Brand Yourself"

"Open source contributors, brand yourself."  That's the title of an article I just read which was actually an interview with the co-founders of SourceKibitzer, Anton Litvinenko and Mark Kofman.  SourceKibitzer is a site that gives recognition to developers who contribute to open source projects.  It is not much unlike, Ohloh, a site I discussed in a post some time ago, though Ohloh appears to be further down the development path in terms of functionality that they expose.  Ohloh also seems to be more focused on  being project-centric whereas SourceKibitzer is more contributor-centric.   

I did find it interesting that SourceKibitzer follows a User Programmed Service (U-PS) model.  To quote from the article a U-PS is "Open Source [software] adapted to the development of a software as a service (SaaS). The source code is open, infrastructure is built in order to support participation, but the software itself is deployed as a service."

This is the first time that I'd heard of this type of model.  I decided I'd find out more about it.  A quick google search later and I realized that wikipedia didn't even have an entry for it yet.  In fact, the only place that had any reference to it was SourceKibitzer.  So it appears that this model is more new than I had first expected.  It will be interesting to see where this project goes and how this model sustains itself.

New Look for Spring

I really like the new look for the Spring Framework .NET logo.  Definitely a good change for them.  If you're using .NET, and you're not familiar with Spring consider giving it a look.  I've met too many .NET developers who haven't and they're making a mistake by not knowing what they are passing up.

DataTable Expressions

Day-to-day programming almost always leads you to a problem that you're not quite sure how to solve.  Luckily the Internet is there to save the day and for every problem I've had there have to be at least several thousand developers who've had the same issue.  Of those several thousand developers, there has to be at least several dozen who have written a blog post, quick tutorial or some other web content that explains the issue and how they resolved it.

As a result, I never feel the need to publish many solutions as most of the time I'd just be rehashing content that's already out there.

Once again, that is the case now, but I was so happy to notice this solution that I thought I'd rehash a fairly simply concept: DataTable Expressions. 

I don't do much with DataSets.  I use them quite sparingly and usually only for quick programming tasks.  I had such a programming task the other day and needed to perform some simple, but dynamically generated calculations on the data within the DataSet.  Clearly there were a number of ways to accomplish this, but I came across one of the overloads on the Add method on the DataColumnCollection class, exposed through the Columns property on the DataTable that solved my problem quite simply.

This method took three parameters, the name of the column, the data type for the column and finally an expression.  The expression allows you to add an on-the-fly calculation field to the DataTable. 

So in a situation where you might have a two column DataTable one called Price and another called Quantity, you could add a third column to the table named Total and given it an expression of Price * Quantity.

My tests so far have shown it to perform reasonably well given the conditions I have it working under.

Is There Beauty In Code?

I realized just how big a nerd I was when I opened the first pages of my newest purchase from Amazon, Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think.  As an architect might look at a building, see beauty and put it into words, the programmers in this book try to do the same.

I've only read through the first three chapters, the titles of which give you an idea as to just what kind of person might read this book:

• Chapter 1: A Regular Expression Matcher
• Chapter 2: Subversion's Delta Editor: Interface as Ontology
• Chapter 3: The Most Beautiful Code I Never Wrote

While I have only read though less than one-tenth of the text, I feel like there's value in what I'm reading.  Sure, understanding why an implementation of QuickSort is beautiful to someone isn't exactly useful to my everyday development efforts.  It doesn't answer a problem or even address the domain or programming abstraction level that I usually work at.   It does, however, help further open a dimension to the perspective in which I view the product of my workday.

The moment you can find beauty in your work whether you build furniture or build software, your job becomes immediately less of a "job".  I first saw beauty in software very early in my career.  It appeared in the form of a data model .  I could tell it was "beautiful" from across the room where the words were so small as to be completely illegible and the entities simply wired boxes with thin highways of lines connecting them together.  For all that abstraction from that sky-high view, I can still remember marvelling at it with its chief designer, as we threw one implementation scenario after another at it, looking for holes.

While I've spoken of beauty in code with some colleagues, this book represents one of the first times I can remember seeing something like this in print.  As I wrote earlier, I don't know how much practical use this book is, but it allows programmers an opportunity to see their work from a perspective we rarely take the time to see it from.

Attacking Java on The Server Side

Nothing quite starts a discussion on The Server Side like the guy who starts a post that plays to the fear/passion of every Java developer: "Java is Doomed".  I honestly tried not to read all the replies, but I did give it a quick scan as those kind of posts typically leads me to links to and information on new innovations in the Java world from folks who want to defy those who believe that Java is on its way out.  I'm sorry to say I had no such luck on this thread.