Blogs with your Eggnog

I just love reading Ted Dziuba's blog.  The guy has a way with words and to top it off, a wonderfully cynical sense of humor.  The latest post goes over his method for spotting engineering talent.  Specifically, how he determines who is and isn't a valuable engineer (his formula is valuable = smart + productive + battle-tested).  He gleans the most information by figuring out what pisses the candidate off.  Particularly if it's some piece of a technology that they otherwise enjoy.   Good stuff.

Another of my favorites from the blogosphere is Kitchen Soap, an operations focused missive which subscribes to the development/ops (Dev/Ops) philosophy (sadly, it's a philosophy that is a long ways from catching on in most corporate IT departments).

Nutrun (gotta love it for the name alone) is another I've been perusing of late, especially the post related to incremental deployment, since large scale deployment with lots of moving parts has been an increasing interest of mine.

I see Spring 3.0 went final.  I still think Spring rocks, but there is increasing grumbling that the lightweight rebel who helped depose the bloated, self-satisfied Java EE king is itself getting a little bloated and self-satisfied (maybe there's some fear regarding SpringSource's new VMWare master and what it'll do to the technology).  Meanwhile, Java EE 6 has come out after a good while in the gym looking much more fit and useable again. Perhaps ready for another run at the crown?  Maybe.  I wouldn't go quite so far myself just yet.  Like I said, I still think Spring rocks.

Speaking of Spring, I can't wait for it to get here - already sick of snow not even two days into winter ...

Nothing new under the sun (perhaps I should say "under the oracle")

It's been a month since I've posted here and I sense this Technology Blather feels more than a bit neglected (especially if it's found out how active I've been on the other two non-techie blogs I maintain).  Frankly, I just haven't been feeling all that passionate about the world of technology lately - nothing has really floated my boat and gotten me fired up.   I'm always interested in unique solutions to web-scale capacity and concurrency problems, and data integration sort of falls into that bin for me as well.

I've been piddling around with Erland and Scala around the house and checking out what folks are doing in the world of web and object caching for large-scale distributed systems.  But nothing to write home (or, more specifically, to write here) about.

Gregor had an interesting post just a bit ago.  Gregor doesn't post on his blog a whole lot, but when he does, it's always worth reading.

Ted Dziuba is entertaining as always and introduced Milo.com late last month.

Dan North talks about two of my favorite software development approaches (one pattern based and the other process based) and shows how they are in so many ways very much made for one another.

But none of this is new under the sun - all of it is great but nothing earth shattering.  I'm hoping for good things come 2010 ...