Not sure if it is the Tryptophan comma I am in the day after Thanksgiving or explaining to my family that software engineers do more then make screen savers. What ever the reason, Black Friday for me means bypassing the long lines at the mall and instead writing a Blog about random ideas that have popped into my head.

Here we go:

1.) I am officially in the cool kids club – On Nov 16th I went to the TechCrunch.com party in Boston and hung out. There were some pretty interesting Startups there. Not sure if any are viable long term but you never know.

Here are my Web 2.0 startup ideas:

• CommentComedy.com – An aggregation site of all the funniest blog comments, articles and videos. People can vote and we will promote them to the home page similar to dzone.com. Rationale – Web is boring, this would make it better.
• Comedy Troupe 2.0 – A company that hires the funniest people on the web and pays them per “lol” they get on selected websites. Rationale – most of time reading the comments is the best thing about Blogs and this would make it even better.
• Wordpress Plugin that connects Bloggers with retired English teachers to improve the grammar and spelling in the Blogisphere. Rationale – I need this most of all.

My second reason for electing myself into the cool kids club is my new iPhone. I have had it for about a week now and it really inspires you to push the design of everything further. The device is perfect except for a couple of things. Look and feel, usability, everything is just the way you think it should be.

Me before my iPhone	Me after my iPhone

A few months back I went into my local Mac Store and was checking out the iPhone and took the picture on the left. I Showed the picture to my wife later that night and she asked why I looked so mad. Not sure why I was so mad that day, maybe it was because I knew I would have to sell my clothes on EBay in order to pay for the iPhone

First thing I did with my iPhone, check out the rockstarapps.com to see how it worked, not to bad.

A couple things about the iPhone that I don’t understand. Why does it need Java? Apple is creating a dev kit for the phone and safari is full functional. My opinion of Java on iPhone is KEEP IT OFF. We should be driving towards only open web applications for the iPhone or native applications.

I hope my memberships doesn’t get revoked like my wikipedia page.

2.) Coach Wei in one of his latest Blogs touched a nerve with his “Why isn’t Facebook built with Java?” We talk about this in the office quite a bit and really never come up with a solid answer. I don’t know everyones reasoning but why I choose PHP is as follows:

• Godaddy.com doesn’t have tomcat running on its’ servers. This one is a no-brainer, if tomcat was used by ISPs more people would use it.
• No matter how much Java Evolves and new features are added, it still isn’t as easy to use as a C style language like PHP. Displaying a page is a very linear concept, start at the top then move to the bottom. Classes, inheritance and access modifiers are all great but far less important than being able to easily load a file from a URL in one line of code with out needing to download a library and learning all the exceptions the method throws. All I need is fopen(”my-url”, “r”).
• Graduated Usability is a concept I have written about a few times in the past and it is one of the biggest reasons I like PHP. Learn a little bit, I can accomplish things, learn a little more, I can do even more. Java is the complete opposite, I need to learn everything about; Java the language, Application Servers, Web frameworks, data connectors, and God help me if I need to connect to Web Services. Here is a simple task – load up a list of images from Flickr and create a web page using a JSP page.

3.) I am not sure if we as platform providers are solving the correct problem. I was just on Parleys.com watch a video of Java Server frameworks – See my last section. It seems like we just keep redoing the same shit over and over. We haven’t solved any problems that developing software has?

• How do I built an application that looks awesome? To this day we need to hire graphic designers to create applications. Why isn’t there templates for application developers, there are plenty for web developers.
• Round trip of data, in a CRUD applications? the operations are pretty standard why can’t this be almost automatic.

As a software developers what I am looking for is the “Freedom to Create”. I have an idea, I want to implement it. For me the assembly of the application is the best part, stitch the bits and pieces together

4.) Is software engineering a blue-collar or a white-collar Job? Not sure why I was thinking of this but it popped into my head today. I told you I was in a turkey induced comma. White-collar seems like the obvious choice: software developers go to college, work in an office, are considered professionals and don’t do manual labor. Those reasons would have been appropriate in the past, but we live in a service/software economy and I would vote software engineering is a blue-collar job and here are the following reasons:

• Software Engineers are the manual workers of the software industry. We don’t cast molten steel, but we do work with our hands and people are always looking to automate the process as much as possible.
• Jobs can be outsourced to cheap labor.
• Software Engineers dress like painters, see picture above

5.) The following laws I know to be true in software development.

• Contention brings integrity to the design process – This law is absolute. If everyone is always in agreement, then you are all probably wrong.  Software development is a collection of decisions with more than one right answer, if everyone is always in agreement than people are not paying enough attention, or they are not passionate about the outcome.
• Perception – Expectation = Satisfaction – This a derivative of the under-promise and over-deliver saying but geared to acquisition of new customers. I go out on many sales calls and trying to set the expectation of the users that will engage with the software after I am gone, is the hardest job.  Need to tell everyone it is so easy a ten year old can do it but counter that with it will take some work.  Everything has a learning curve so the question, “How long will this take to learn?” is always hard to answer. Can’t say, “After sitting here talking with you for an hour, you Sir won’t even be able to figure out how to download it?”

For everyone that tolerates my poor writing and keeps coming back for more, I would like to thank you. Stay tuned for some up coming news, I am working on some pretty cool things that will be released in the near future and will be continuing the jsLex project.

Bob (Buff0ne)