Um, hi.
So it's mid-2007 and a self-proclaimed geek like me is just getting a blog? What's up with that? What the hell have I been doing? Well, there have been a few things...
At Mirus, and at Sankaty before being acquired, we are building a SaaS Business Intelligence company. I'm not sure when you stop calling yourself a startup. I guess you stop when you're making your own money. We've been doing that (only took 8 years), but maybe you drop the startup tag when you're making enough to pay everyone closer to market value than the sweatshop wages you have been paying. In any case, the experience has been phenomenal, from technology to corporate structure and finance, I have a wee bit to offer the world now, and hope to share intermittently in this blog.
My sidebars have been investigating new programming languages. I came from the VB world, and was elated to 'get out.' We web-enabled the product above with Java, and that was okay for the most part. I briefly studied K&R to learn C, but then started to hit some languages that I really enjoyed.
* the D Programming Language - I liked it enough to start the language's version of sourceforge. See http://www.dsource.org. I will also be speaking at the first D Conference. Gotta think of something interesting to say...
* Lisp - quite the eye-opener. We attempted to rewrite Mirus' BI query engine in Lisp, but my developer's minds weren't as twisted as mine. They felt more productive in Java, and I got the usual pressure from the higher-ups that it's easier to bring people off the street with Java skills than Lisp. Pfft.
* Python - great language, and I've totally dissected the Trac codebase while learning it. Dsource uses Trac and a lot of custom plugins to operate all the projects it hosts. Django is pretty bad-ass as a web framework as well, and I hope to contribute some code (enhanced db backend) to that project real soon.
* Erlang -wow, this language has just been sitting there, waiting patiently with all its goodness, for someone to come along and do amazing things with it. That someone will hopefully be me ;) Concurrent, fault tolerant, distributed, functional... /me drools. So far, there's one web server, Yaws, that can kick the crap out of Apache. I'm wondering if Erlang is as well suited as it appears to be for a cometd server. That'd help out some people with traffic between their servers and the browser, eh? All while saving them hardware moolah because of the stupid amount of processes Erlang can run. Maybe if I do this for someone, they get to pay the developers more? Maybe if I use it myself, I get to break-even faster?
Finally, and most importantly, the family has been growing over the past few years. Nora is almost three, and she gets a baby sister in about two weeks. gulp...
Wow, so I'm new to blogging, and this could have been divided up into 18 different posts. That's coming... I just had to braindump to get started.
Cheers
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