Black Bag Operations Network

I missed Scoble’s talk about his book at work today. I had planned to attend but work priorities intervened. I was also a little alarmed to see the animosity displayed towards Amazon by a couple of his posters who are authors who think they are not getting good treatment from us. That’s not how we want to be seen and its definitely not indifference. Everyone is empowered to point out problems and demand they be fixed. We all work together on that. Its one of the things I like about working there.

Its much more fun to work at Amazon than, say, Microsoft. If I meet someone and tell them where I work, the response I get is usually something like “Oh I love shopping on Amazon!”. Cool. If I worked at Microsoft I expect I’d mostly get “Why doesn’t this thing work on my computer”. Nobody loves Windows.

The Amazon website is probably on par with Google in terms of raw computing power required. To me its amazing that it works as well as it does given the volumes it handles and the level of individual customization it does. It is definitely way beyond the bounds of how most software developers think about building websites. This is also fun because it feels like we are always breaking new ground and my creative side needs that.

I’d go nuts if all I had to do was hack out another lame J2EE piece of garbage. What does Sun know about massively scalable web applications anyway – do they have one? Right. Thought not.

I expect Scoble would also want to know why I don’t blog about work. That’s easy. I’ve been fired one too many times for opening my mouth at the wrong time about the wrong thing and my family isn’t too keen on moving again anytime soon. We’ve moved every other year for the past 6 and we’d like to settle down a bit.

(History: Cheap Bastards, Inc fired me for mentioning to one team mate that I didn’t think the planned approach was sensible. He snitched and I was shown the door for not being a team player)

I’m not up for another job hunt anytime soon. I’m older now, have a kid entering school, I’m hyper-experienced and skilled (read “overqualified”). I’m not satisfied with working most places. I don’t fit the “young workaholic” model. I don’t much care what crummy new language most people are learning this month, and I’m definitely tired of being introduced by the B-School CEO of the fluffy startup to investors as “the smartest guy in the company”. If I’m the best we’ve got, then we’re hosed. At Amazon, I’m about average. This is great.

Plus, if I tell you too much about the inside of Amazon, I have to kill you.

When I got home from work today, I found a box waiting. My ordered long ago MacBook Pro has arrived and I’ve spent all evening moving my data from my TiBook. Upgrading apps to universal binaries, and downloading the developer tools (which are streaming down as I write this). Once that’s done there is all the open source stuff to recompile and then I’m done. Probably take a couple more days.

ObjectiveCLIPS allows the creation of intelligent Cocoa applications with persistent object models and complex business rules. Out of the box, Apple gives you the ability to write Cocoa applications with dumb passive data models using CoreData. However, there is no convenient way to express complex constraints and dependent values without writing custom business objects. Even if you write the custom objects, your code will likely be fragile for a variety of reasons. ObjectiveCLIPS allows you to write rules about your objects and execute actions when rules match.

Version 1.7 provides significant performance enhancements and trace level logging. Check out the press release.

According to the Personal DNA test.

It seems that the new bubble is now outpacing the old one.  Most of us learned about the perils of VC money the first time around and are using alternative bootstrapping techniques to launch new ventures.  After all, the VC’s kept all the equity and saddled the founders with clueless board members that promptly steered the companies into unprofitable models.

So we’ve wised up.  No VC money.  With sensible advertising models it is possible to build something on the web and gradually scale it up.  Now it seems the VC’s aren’t happy about being left outside.  Do they clean up their act?  Nope.  They do the only thing they know how to do.  They throw money at people who don’t even want it.

Guys – over here!  I’ve got a great new AJAX enabled dog food I’m marketing!