I recently read Dave Thomas’ recent post titled “The Canary Benefit“, and it reminded me that I had never made note of my switch back to OS X as my main operating system. My attempts to run my accounting and contact management on GNU/Linux over the past few years have been pretty dismal. The several options I tried to use for accounting led me to end up having to enter a year and a half of business transactions into QuickBooks from scratch, the tipping point being when I couldn’t even pull a meaningful profit and loss report for my accountant. Over time some Multisync failures had decimated my contact database as well, and that started to cost me.

Deciding to switch back to Mac was a no-brainer, but with the advent of Leopard I can say for the first time that I seem to be experiencing a bit of cruft like I have from other operating systems. Weird lockups, less-than-smooth transitions from sleep, goofy resume behavior when switching to an external monitor, etc. Don’t get me wrong, I love several features in Leopard enough to put up with the annoyances. They do, however, give me pause.

My post about a Python web frameworks OpenSpace convened at CodeMash drew a bit of attention, and looking over it again, I can see how it can send messages I did not intend. In order to break my trend of sitting on posts for weeks and months, I pushed myself to get this one out even though I wanted to finesse it more. The main person who could have taken this the wrong way would be Mark Ramm, who convened the talk and is also currently heading up my favorite Python web framework.

Instead of launching some missive or flaming the comments of my post, Mark took the time to further explain the situation for TurboGears both past and future. He even apologized if he may have unintentionally spoken ill of the JVM (which he did not). Mind you, I am no defender of the JVM, but I can see how I might seem like it from that post. Mark also sent an email which explained some of the discussion items and after hearing that, I was far less concerned about where things are heading with that project.

I have known Mark for about a year now. We have had dinner together and shared many funny stories (he has many, should you ever have occasion to hear them). I consider him a friend, and his reaction to that post is an example of what I have come to enjoy about the Python community. After reading Zed Shaw’s “Rails is a Ghetto” tonight, I am even more thankful for it. Man, even if you filter through the bile and profanity, it still sounds like this dude received some rough treatment for trying to do the right thing at times. And if some of it is true, then I need to rethink some of the folks whose work I endorse.

So tomorrow I fly out to Cleveland for the 1-hour ride to Sandusky, Ohio for CodeMash. The first CodeMash ever took place last year, and I was very glad to have been a part of it. I had intended to submit proposed talks for this year, but alas my schedule was already a bit full and I honestly lacked the energy to put together the topics I would have wanted to present. I cannot wait to be there, several of my colleagues from Bruce Eckel’s OpenSpace conferences will be attending.

One benefit of being an independent consultant is that I am able to choose the conferences I attend without having to justify it to some management or department head. Most of the things I choose to attend would probably not be approved by an organization that insists on being able to directly relate the entirety of a conference’s content of focus to the attendee’s daily tasks. Still, there are numerous conferences throughout the year that appeal to me, and I can only afford to be unbillable for a certain number of weeks out of the year. CodeMash makes my shortlist, and here are a few reasons:

• CodeMash is a multi-language conference. There’s a breadth of exposure and a cross-pollenation of ideas that are simply not available at single-language events.
• The attendees drawn to such events are typically more open-minded about software development approaches and the fact that there is no “one way” or “one language” for anything.
• The speakers drawn to this type of conference tend to have a perspective that is broader and more in touch with software development realities than insisting on foisting some delusional monocultural vision for their language/platform/tool of choice.
• There’s a strong OpenSpace element to CodeMash, and I have experienced first-hand how amazing and energizing it can be.

So, that is why I am going to CodeMash. Looking forward to sharing my experience with my readers, all three of them.

Over the weekend I managed to get the Time & Money project repository migrated over to Subversion. It was a fun one because the modules needed to be rearranged into the directory structure that the team had worked out. I kept a log of my steps with the goal of turning that into a how-to that may be of help to other Sourceforge projects that have yet to migrate from CVS. I just need the time to make it more of a cogent how to and less of a stream-of-consciousness ramble.

I wrote earlier about the apparent embrace of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) within the Interface21 team, the group behind the excellent Spring framework for Java applications. I have been thinking about why it is that Spring in particular would lend itself to the application of DDD.

I first expressed this during the review of the DDD track last Wednesday for the start of the conference. The escape from the productivity hit we all took with Java EE when Spring first began to be known was a big deal. The ability to have an layered, n-tier application that was testable out of the application container, with the ability to wire up a bean container’s contents via a straightforward XML syntax breathed new life into many a tired J2EE web application. Lines and lines of tiresome boilerplate code for DAOs were replaced with clean, small implementations that extended the appropriate Spring template. The effectiveness of our domain models were about the furthest thing from our minds. Why didn’t we immediately address domain modeling as soon as we had our sea legs with Spring?

I would say it’s analogous to not being that concerned about what clothes you are wearing when you are starving to death. Remember Maslow’s hierarchy of need from basic psychology in college? Few people whose physiological and safety need are not being met care that much about self-actualization. There are enough shops using Spring for there to have been two consecutive conferences dedicated to the technology. Spring is ubiquitious; that was the thrust of Rod Johnson’s keynote today. It has proven itself as a productive, viable foundation of enterprise Java applications the world over. Given that foundation, there exists the capacity to ask, “how can we now move to the next level of applying Spring in the best manner possible?” Domain-driven design answers that question.

Domain-Driven Design is not easy, and many, if not most, technologies actually impede the application of DDD. This is where Spring stands out among the raft of framework options. It has always had the intent of staying out of one’s way rather than attempt to infuse all of your code with its own prescriptive dogma (insert JSR of choice here). Spring stays out of your way, enabling the necessary insulation of your domain model. Since it is also Open Source software, there’s no need to bolster a revenue model by implementing any such ugliness in an attempt to ensure vendor lock-in. The Interface21 group is freed of that burden throughy their choice of Open Source, they are freed to pursue excellence in the code unfettered by a need to drive sales of the software. Since they depend on revenues through services, they are driven to make the best framework possible that will be of sufficient utility for more people to need training and consultation they provide. The model seems quite sustainable, and I wish them the best.