Thursday, September 18, 2003

The tale of Sanjeev My friend Sanjeev Kale has just sold his software company to SCT. Sanjeev emigrated from India to attend the Berklee School of Music about 12 years ago, and then started Newfront to develop immigration software after working in Berklee's foreign student office. He has long had the annoying habit of killing himself to please his customers -- he would always ignore ROI in implementing new features and simply focused on what the users asked for. It wasn't an business strategy his software developer pals really understood, but in the 8 gruelling years building up his company he also developed a peerless reputation. Leveraging this, he was able to deliver the first and best software package allowing colleges to comply with fairly recent homeland-security-related reporting requirements. His software worked and sold well right from the start, while the 800 lb gorillas in the educational software field, SCT and Peoplesoft, had a much harder time tweaking their ERP systems to comply. Anyway, I wish him well in his newly sane existence, which I expect will include much playing and singing of the Flamenco that he studied as an undergrad. 2:32:02 PM      comment []  trackback []

More unpaid VM evangelizing from me on web development with VMWare. I should really get sponsored. 9:39:34 AM      comment []  trackback []

Ambitious Autrijus http://search.cpan.org/author/AUTRIJUS/Template-Generate-0.04/lib/Template/Generate.pm Template: ($template + $data) ==> $document # normal Template::Extract: ($document + $template) ==> $data # tricky Template::Generate: ($data + $document) ==> $template # very tricky In terms of ambition, I think this module ranks right up there with Parrot+Perl6. :-) Actually, I have read about refactoring tools that look for duplicated or nearly duplicated source code that could be candidates for consolidation into subroutines. Implementing something similar would be an enormously useful addition to the Template::Toolkit (the BLOCK-ifier), and I would think it would be a achievable goal. I'm using LEO's cloned nodes feature to fake this type of refactoring in ASP/CFM/HTML/XML/etc. The benefit is you can apply the concept of subroutine code consolidation to arbitrary blocks of text. A cloned node is simply a pointer to the block of text so that you can update it in one place, and have it reflected immediately in all other references. For the many languages a web/db developer works with that don't support that kind of reuse, it's a godsend. I should add that although most web languages do support some kind of include file syntax, I've found it much easier to use the cloned nodes as an intermediary step before I break things out into different parts of the filesystem. It's much easier to edit the files in context, and use LEO's outliner to show the structure of the document you're working with, and delaying having to commit to a certain file structure until the last minute helps you name and organize things better. There's a good LEO Tutorial here. 9:04:15 AM      comment []  trackback []