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So I’m not in Denver, as some of you are aware. The original plan was for me to speak at a panel at DU this evening, but as could and perhaps should have been anticipated my schedule got in the way once more. Attempting to fly from real Portland to Denver last night, I was misplaced just long enough to make trying to get to my connecting gate futile in the amount of time available. Rather than fight those long odds, I cancelled the Denver leg of the trip, and hung a quick u-turn back to Portland.
Which is not the worst thing that could have happened, frankly. I’ve been so run around what with travel and moving and getting settled that a quiet weekend here in Maine is probably just what the doctor ordered. Especially since the parents are up for the weekend and the boat, as you can see, is in the water.
Anyway, the usual Friday grab bag of items that may deserve their own entries but aren’t getting them.
A much belated congratulations to Adobe for their decision to open the Flash specification among other assets. Many will argue that it should have been open from the start, but I do not necessarily agree; much like I’m actually of the belief that it was necessary to initially open Solaris under the shield of the CDDL until it could stand on its own two legs, the closed nature of the Flash specification afforded Adobe the opportunity to cement the status of the asset in order to prevent potentially damaging forks (see Microsoft v Java). That said, it was time to lower the gates and transition to a new phase of Flash’s existence, and credit Adobe for seeing that (and Anne for prodding the conversation along).
The news, however, is likely to disappoint those that were seeking an open sourcing of Flash, or a standardization of the format. On the latter question, CTO Kevin Lynch told us that there were no plans at the moment to submit Flash to a formal standards body, in part because the format was still evolving quickly and standards bodies evolve…less quickly. Which is a fair point. As is noting that even if Flash is open, Adobe by controlling all aspects of the format and its direction can act to limit competing players if they so choose.
What interests me about all of this, however, is the growing sense that by not have a multimedia runtime like Flash or Silverlight, some of the bigger technology players in the industry may have missed a trick and an opportunity. Unless they can exploit the newly opened SWF spec.
Hmm…
Clouds have been dominating not only recent coverage but the conversations I’m having at the moment. Even last week’s JavaOne featured literally dozens of cloud oriented discussions and plays.
One thing that I remain convinced of: the cloud world needs standards to guide it, and these standards are too important to let Amazon, VMWare or others dictate them. Which is undoubtedly what will happen, given current directions.
But eventually we’ll see standards - probably from the market laggards and likely based on open source virtualization technologies - and those players will be rewarded. The differentiation should not come from proprietary packaging approaches, but in how efficiently you can run your infrastructure.
I want, just like many potential cloud customers I’ve spoken with, the opportunity to snapshot a running system and run that not on one player, but many. It’ll take a while to get there, but I think we will.
Like Caroline, I am no fan of timezones. I’d prefer, in fact, to see the planet on one single timezone. Not in the derivative UTC -5 case, but quite literally. I’d also like for high speed trains to criss-cross the country, and I’m not sure which of those would happen first.
Anyway, here’s a classic example of why timezones suck (and why it’s good to get to the airport as absurdly early as I do). Back on the 25th, when I was returning from the Web 2.0 expo on a morning flight out of SFO, I showed up at the Frontier counter, plugged my credit card into the check-in kiosk and was told that the flight was too close to boarding and that I needed to speak to an actual person.
Which was obviously wrong, because the flight didn’t leave until 10:20 and it was 8:55.
Or at least it didn’t leave until 10:20 on my TripIt/Dopplr calendars, which were of course on Mountain Time rather than Pacific Time, making the actual time of my flight…you guessed it. 9:20 AM.
Not to try and deflect blame for the error - I did end up making the flight thanks to my CLEAR card - onto either Dopplr or TripIt, as this is clearly my fault, it’s still true that most software handles timezones poorly. While my phone automatically knows what timezone I’m in, my calendar doesn’t, nor does my email, or my IM, or any other piece of software I use in which time is a consideration.
It would be nice if we do away with timezones permanently, or failing that design software that handles them more gracefully. I’ll hold my breadth, sadly, for neither.
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“At Crowd Favorite we are web developers, not system admins. We understand how to build something so it can scale, but actually doing the server config and managing them on a day to day basis is not our core competency.” - Alex King
Candidly, it’s interesting how much I hear that sentiment expressed these days. That scalability is a challenge is, I suspect, a mystery to no one. That it’s as common a problem as it is might surprise you.
It’s true, in my view, that cloud computing is likely to soften demand for this type of service, as scalability becomes a feature rather than a product. As Matt puts it:
Infrastructure can be a competitive advantage today — the speed and reliability of WordPress.com has certainly put us in a favorable light with users, especially large customers — but that’s going to disappear over time. We’re very much at version 0.1 of things like Amazon’s web services and App Engine, but it’s not hard to read the writing on the wall and understand that level of abstraction is going to be the future foundation of web applications. I’m not counting on infrastructure to be a long-term competitive advantage for Automattic
And yet even in the accelerating build out of cloud computing offerings, the demand for scaling skills remains high. Which makes me wonder: where are the boutique consultancies catering to scalability? Or even more general systems administration?
It may be, of course, that they’re prevalent but just not on my radar, because boutique services firms are not where I spend most of my time. More to the point, there are clearly a great many systems ninjas content to high margin contract work. But I am somewhat surprised, given the rampant demand, that we haven’t seen more of these systems administrators band together in the form of high quality consulting outfits.
In conversations with some potential candidates for this type of gig, I’ve been reminded that the nature of systems administrative work is fundamentally different enough from, say, the type of design and coding work that Crowd Favorite does to present problems with the model. Which is an excellent point.
To which I’d respond: wouldn’t it be nice to be on call for shorter and shorter periods of time, because you could rotate the responsibility amidst a collective of admins you trust? Some would scoff at the possibility, believing that that kind of trust is impossible to find, but that’s precisely what we did at the two shops in which I was afflicted with pagers and 3270 telnet access to the mainframe.
Plus, it seems clear to me that there are more possibilities for ongoing, subscription type work (read: recurring revenues) - presumably automated via systems management technologies - for clients in this space than in the pure design or the web programming and architecture spaces. Or maybe you think Debian/Ubuntu users were excited to patch these vulnerabilities yesterday on their own?
I know when we were hacked and casting about for security expertise, the guys over at Inverse Path were recommended to us only after a long and often fruitless search. Querying some of the best technologists on the planet, no one had any great, off-the-cuff suggestions for a sysadmin for hire. Luckily, those guys turned out to be an outstanding resource that we’ve applied towards other issues we’ve had, but where are the rest of the Inverse Paths of the world?
Are they out there and I just can’t see them? If not, why not? Should the systems management players begin trying to build out such ecosystems around their products? Should some of the web development firms begin adding these services as lines of business?
Inquiring minds want to know.
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Reviews, frankly, were mixed, but I enjoyed the past few days at CommunityOne and JavaOne. Critics highlighted a distinct lack of real news at the event, at least of the Java flavor, and there was the usual grumbling about the scheduling tool, the event staff, and so on. But regardless, JavaOne is a massive event, and a center of gravity for developer communities.
Note that I said developer communities, not Java communities. It is the latter, obviously. But the introduction of CommunityOne two years ago has done much to make the event more heterogeneous than in years past. To the tune of 5,000 registered attendees. All of which is a good thing, in my humble opinion.
What will be interesting, from my perspective as a long term attendee of the show, will be how the fate of JavaOne may be influenced by the rise of the aforementioned CommunityOne. As a systems vendor, it has always been in Sun’s best interests to encourage deployments beyond Java, even if they haven’t always realized it. CommunityOne, increasingly, is the embodiment of that idea, and with MySQL now in the fold the diversity of the event is ever greater.
So the question on many minds, including mine, is this: at what point does CommunityOne eat JavaOne? Such a combination, while logical on paper from where I sit, would nonetheless pose some complexity and scope problems: the conference is already enormous. Still, as the O’Reilly folks point out regularly, the trajectories for non-Java languages are fairly unambiguous. While Java remains an enormous community full of developers and jobs for said developers, the world is - more than ever - bigger than Java. As folks like Senor Bray have helped to drive home.
Whatever CommunityOne and JavaOne end up being called, I know that I’ll be in attendance. It’s rare, after all, that I get the opportunity to collect an audience of this caliber in one place, ply them with booze, and just listen.
That’s worth a couple of days of my time, easily.
Disclosure: Sun, the primary organizer of JavaOne, is a RedMonk client and comped hotel expenses for the trip.
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Things were dire. Perhaps not quite as dire as The Contrarian might argue, but suboptimal. Intending to lower the barriers to participation in a series of CommunityOne events, all of the tracks were housed under a single roof. A single roof over a cavernous, uncarpeted space mottled with round tables, plastic chairs and thin, futile sound barriers.
But you know what? RedMonkOne was - again - a success, in spite of some long odds. At least as I judge such things. Thunderous easy listening last year, air raid sirens and bullhorns this year, you just can’t keep the RedMonk community down.
Because the day really was about the community, not us. Whether it’s Ian Murdock, Mårten Mickos, and Neelan Choksi stopping by to talk about open source business models, Ted Leung leading a discussion on dynamic languages (yes, Python came up), Mike Pittaro building RESTful web services, Mik Kersten talking Eclipse and Mylyn, Danese Cooper on what it’s like working for big cos, James and others leading a session on corporate Twittering, we had an excellent slate of content and sessions - venue be damned (seriously).
If you don’t buy that, just look at the scene for the 5 PM RIA discussion, which featured representatives from Adobe, Sun, Google, and pretty much everyone else that has ever contemplated offering (or killing) an RIA platform.
A couple of the sessions have notes which, when the dust settles from the show, will be posted online, but for those that missed the day, well, you missed something solid. You also missed a couple of hundred dollars worth of free beers and vodka sodas here. (For the folks that got there right at 9 as originally requested, my apologies for being late: herding people is time consuming).
Given the success of the day, some thanks are in order. First, we’d like to thank Sun for the opportunity and the venue - problematic though it may have been. It speaks well of the firm, I think, that they afford us this venue to meet with all of you. Second, I’d like to thank our sponsors Atlassian, who not only made up a t-shirt that I would actually wear, they kicked in cash to cover said beers and vodka sodas. Third, I’d like to thank everyone who came in to speak at the conference; I know many of the folks involved had literally a 45 minute window to spare durating the day, and the fact that they’d take advantage of that to speak at our track is both flattering and humbling. Hugely appreciated.
But last, and most trite, we at RedMonk would like to thank each and every one of the folks that took the time to attend a session, participate in a discussion, and make the day a success irrespective of the numerous distractions of sound and people. It would have been easy to get discouraged by the setting and abandon the effort straight out of the gate, but all of you chose to make the best of it, and did you ever. I can’t speak for any of you, but that was, to me, a day well spent. Would that I had more of those.
So thanks to everyone involved, and we hope to be back next year to see you (and we’ll get a better venue, we promise).
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