I just read on news.ycombinator.com via Eric.Weblog via Z trek that the Programming Magazine Dr. Dobbs will no longer be publishing it’s normal monthly rag.  Click for Dr. Dobbs take.  That really stinks.  Even though I don’t read it regularly any more.  When I started my first full-time job back in 1995, I read Dr. Dobbs and MSJ (Microsoft System Journal) every month.

Back then both of those magazine were sold at newsstands and bookstores, so every month I would go with my girlfriend now wife to Borders and buy the latest copy of each magazine.  My wife has way different tastes then me so she got… actually not sure she got, I was busy reading my magazines. In the early days of my career, I always looked to the publication to learn new programming technique, and spark new ideas. Dr Dobbs was throughout the time I read the magazine high quality and packed with a variety of programming languages and implementation ideas.  Variety, I felt was one of its greatest attributes.  It never seemed to focus in one area but rather gave an introduction to many different things.  This was completely opposite to MSJ which focused for obvious reasons on Microsoft (This was a great magazine as well). Read more…

The other day on TechCrunch was an article about Microsoft’s Popfly Mashup builder getting a game creator interface. Previously, I looked at Popfly for building Mashups but didn’t get past the Wack-a-mole Mashup, so this time I figured I would get the only person I know who has created games.

It is a tough road getting kids who have an interest in software, started in a structured way. Game software offers many of the skills that developers will need in the long run. Products GameMaker, Popfly and even flash give kids a nice tools that keep them interested and allow them to explore software until they are capable using structured languages. Read more…

I am sitting in a hotel room in Ireland waiting to get on a conference call. Why am I in Ireland? On Wednesday, I will giving a presentation at the XTech 2008 conference.

While I am sitting here, I figured I would create a Blog of these screen shots of various web pages. Mostly of things I couldn’t figure out or that were really badly designed. Read more…

There has been quite a bit of chatter lately on the change to Ext JS licensing. Working for a Ajax library/framework/platform vendor myself, I thought I would review the GPL and see how it would relate to an Ajax library. The GPL license was interesting and long. One thing with all licenses is that depending on what you are doing they apply differently.� GPL makes sense for lots of software, MySQL uses the license, the Java source is also GPL. Ajax is slightly different than either of those two products because of how the user interacts with the application.

Open Source licenses are definitely not my Bailiwick. This entry is more to understand and to prompt discussion.

I have updated the blog after more thought and some more reading.

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Last week I was on a European road trip attending 15 meetings with engineers from all over Northern Europe (Belgium, France, Norway, Netherlands) and learned two things about software in Europe.

1. Great pool of talent
2. Companies get software
I spend copious amounts of time in the “field” doing sales calls, Webinars, and conferences here in the US and meet lots of talented people. The difference between US companies and Europe companies from what I saw – now granted I only met 15 out of a million companies – is that the European companies seem to really know how to foster a top notch engineering team. This isn’t an easy thing to do, especially with deadlines, outsourcing, turnover, and all the other things that a company needs to deal with, but one that is a necessity to be successful and compete with those who know how to do it.

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Yesterday, myself and Stefan Andreasen (Kapow Technologies CTO) did a webinar on Enterprise Mashups. Feedback was extremely positive, I completely agree, Nexaweb and Kapow offer Enterprises the abilty to build mashups – Faster – Better – Cheaper. I am a big fan of Kapow and what they offer, users of the technology can create XML feeds from any website whether or not the site publishes one. Can’t tell you everything they do in a sentence so go check them out, Click Image:

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