First and foremost, I’d like to admit I am no concurrency expert. I am a small fish in a big ocean and these are just some ideas I have gleaned from different blogs, programming languages, and brilliant minds. In no way do I take credit for anything more than just aggregating these ideas together in a way that is cohesive and useful to me as a software developer who has dealt mainly in business logic. These ideas and tips will almost assuredly not help any game developers. You guys are hard core. (also see here) I stand in awe of the beauty of your creations.
Anyway, where was I? Ok, so for those of us who are mere mortals, we tend to work mainly on business logic. This means that if you’re anything like me, you’ve spent your fair share of time manipulating scores of entities and have plenty of experience with moving code back and forth across layer boundaries. I know what you think of when you hear people like myself discussing concurrency… you’ve already got enough problems as it is. Am I right? Whether the problems are improving a fragile design, trying to keep legacy code from falling on its face, or just trying to keep up with the demands of your project manager/customer you’ve already got too much work too do… but what if designing for concurrency made your software easier to maintain and improve?
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Tags: concurrency, DDDD, Erlang, FBP
14.Aug.08 
Coding, Developer's Diary 
Comments (0)
I am planning to making a move towards micro-book blogging. What this entails IMO is thoroughly researching a given topic, gathering concrete details and sources, and then writing a carefully thought out article. This is in contrast to my more spur of the moment articles I’ve been writing for the past year or so. While I do plan on still writing those when I tackle a new challenge, I think the biggest thing the blogosphere lacks is people who take the time to do their research rather than just throwing their opinion on the pile.
Blogs need to provide value for people to want to invest their time in reading them, and I think the best way I could do that would be by digesting complex dry material and then writing about it and it’s applications to the day to day programmer.
My next article will be the first one to take on this form. It will be about programming concurrent software and the tools and mindsets necessary to do so and how to apply all of this to something like UI development. Look for it by the end of July (or maybe this weekend since I’m getting a bit of a late start on it).
29.Jul.08 Coding, General Comment (1)
So first things first: Erlang is awesome. Now I seriously see why you need to take the time to learn a few different languages. I began to get interested in Erlang due to my interest in Flow Based Programming which was spurred by my drive to better understand asynchronous program execution and the coming advent of concurrent programming as a necessity. From what I’ve read about Erlang so far is that the biggest strike against it is the fact that it’s a functional programming language.
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Tags: concurrency, Erlang, functional programming
25.Jul.08 Coding, Dev Community, Fun, General Comments (0)
I just open sourced the rock, paper, scissors programming contest client I wrote. I’d like to see more people add more features to it. Hopefully, that happens :). It includes an Adobe Air application you can use to run a contest and also some sample bot competitors that are built with Python/Django.
http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/programming_competitions
Tags: Adobe Air, Adobe Flex, Django, Open Source, Python, Roshambo
25.Jul.08 Coding, Dev Community, Fun Comments (0)
I started an open source project on Assembla.com a couple weeks ago. So far I have a couple team members but no one has really had the time to contribute as of yet. I’m really hoping the work I do will pay off in dividends on this project as the scope is far beyond anything I’ve ever accomplished before (but that’s the exciting part, no?). Anyone is free to come to the project and offer help so feel free to volunteer at http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/locus_app
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Tags: , Locus, Open Source
23.Jul.08 Coding, Dev Community, Developer's Diary Comments (0)
So today (it was Sunday like 15 minutes ago!) I sat down and decided to hell with it and just started trying to whip out some sort of a simple Actionscript 3 flow based programming framework (hereon called AS3 FBP framework for short!). The good news is I do have a framework that is extremely similar to FBP (more…)
Tags: Air, AS3, FBP, Flex
13.Jul.08 Adobe Flex/AIR, Coding, Developer's Diary Comments (0)
This is my first markov chain! I was very excited to see it producing odd english. Here’s a quote from it:
i felt only for i can be swept through to tone. all the language between professional gentlemen, the disparition
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Tags: Algorithms, Python
12.Jun.08 Coding, Developer's Diary, Fun, Python Comments (0)
Why Would Anyone Want to Throw Away Code?
One word: maintenance.
It would seem as though maintenance has become one of the most expensive tasks in modern software development. By expensive, I mean low ROI. It’s a cost that’s incurred just by doing anything that requires understanding the code (rewriting, hiring new programmers, auditing, etc.). Why not just throw the component away and start over? Re-architect at a micro scale.
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Tags: Design Principles, FBP
28.May.08 Coding Comments (0)
Sometimes your first snowflake is a snowball
So I’m a one year plan to be credit card debt free. To help speed that along I’ve been organizing myself and trying different budgeting techniques. I moved all of our credit card debt to interest free cards and I’ve been stuffing a given amount into an ING Direct savings account to accrue. On top of this, I read this blog post about snowflaking and got the idea in my head to speed things along.
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Tags: Budgeting, Finance, Snowflakes
24.May.08 Finance, Personal Comments (0)
A Curer of My Ills
I discovered Flow Based Programming last week as I worked on getting an elegant solution to a complex set of asynchronous calls that I needed to make for an integrations project. Ultimately, it led me to a quasi-flow based software architecture wherein a chunk of data was passed from processor to processor to be… processed. The grrreat (a lil Tony the Tiger for ya) thing about that is that essentially all of these processors started to look a lot like steps in a sequential workflow. Basically, for each action I have a class that identifies how that action will affect the data it is passed. Suddenly I have a large amount of asynchronous code that is extremely maintainable.
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Tags: Asynchronous Programming, FBP, Flow Based Programming
23.May.08 Coding, Coding Education, Developer's Diary Comments (0)
