I support Wikipedia, WordPress and all the others in their campaign against SOPA and PIPA!
God help us all when the time comes to kill the last free medium on the planet.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Intermission
Today's protest against SOPA and PIPA acts have had a tremendous impact on Internet traffic around the globe. Millions of people have been made aware of the irresponsible propositions of attack on freedom in the Network. You can't name it any other way than censorship which is the public enemy number one by any definition.
I support Wikipedia, WordPress and all the others in their campaign against SOPA and PIPA!
God help us all when the time comes to kill the last free medium on the planet.
I support Wikipedia, WordPress and all the others in their campaign against SOPA and PIPA!
God help us all when the time comes to kill the last free medium on the planet.
Friday, January 13, 2012
You don't get to drive - part three
In the recent installments we've looked at software development as a discipline that has its own way of working. Its history, however brief, didn't leave any room for being mistaken with anything else. It is the single, most dynamic part of our modern society. But how do people handle it?
If you're young, in Poland it'd be under 18 years old, you don't technically get to drive a car without adult supervision. That's pure theory nowadays but at least that's how it should be. Being young and funky gets lots of stupid ideas into your head like driving over 100km/h in town chasing a friend without knowing the road ahead. Been there, done that. It doesn't mean I was in my right mind when I did it.
There are places where being wild is good. Certainly things where life is at stake are not the kind of ones where you'd expect one to go all in without training but that's what is actually happening all the time. People (including me) are by definition reckless and unpredictable and nothing is going to change that. There's a reason for that: had we been reasonable all the time no big discoveries would have happened. We wouldn't know about the continents of America, we most probably wouldn't know that radiation is actually bad and finally we'd probably die of hunger had there been no brave hunters risking their lives to master hunting animals.
In today's modern world however we do have the opportunity to make less mistakes - at least less of those obvious ones. And with that let me present you with a definition of two words in German:
Verfügen über - to have the knowledge about something, used in the sense "I do have a driving license"
Beherrschen - to have the ability to do something, used in the sense "I do know how to drive a car"
With those two there's little difference, right? Usually if you do have a driving license you should be capable enough to drive a car. But can you? Is that really what is going on?
Let's try to apply that to software development for a moment. It is obvious you need to study to get the diploma to be a software developer. But does it mean you can do software with it? Can you actually make a living with it? As it turns out yes, you can. The discipline is so vast and by all means so naively taken by so many companies that the moment you step out of school you're ready to go, hot shot! You are the man with the skills. But are you?
In my experience with young graduates and with students it was seldom the case when a young developer right after school was really ready to go. Actually I know only two people that when they came to work at a company with me I felt respect for the wealth of knowledge and humility for things they don't know. And so far it was just the two people I know this far that were open to the suggestion to learn new stuff. There's been sooo many cases where the lack of will to learn new technical skills was demonstrated along with arrogance (not to be confused with confidence) I couldn't even count.
The worst thing about it is they really do get hired! And believe me when I say there are companies where a fresh graduate hired almost off-the-shelve gets the ability to flush the project they are working on literally down the toilette. That means a very young in terms of experience person gets commit access to software that costs hundreds, sometimes even millions of dollars! And we're not talking sporadically - it's how certain companies operate! There's a saying that "there's no person that can't be replaced with a finite number of students". That's how the new markets for software developers came to be.
Obviously in every rule there are exceptions. I know that in the area there are maybe 15%-25% people that really get what software development is all about. And that's actually a very good ratio considering that software development has been announced one of the best paid jobs for graduates and is also viewed as one of the easiest ones in terms of rules.
Yes, rules... What kind of rules are there?
Among those professions I just mentioned there's an MD and a lawyer. Once you're done with your study you don't get to cut-open anybody for any reason, right? You need to gain practice under a trained eye of someone with that experience already there. Otherwise nobody would trust you with a knife doing god knows what to the body of a living soul! Same thing with lawyers. I hope you catch my drift here.
But is it like this with software developers? Do they need to undergo a practice to get certified as software developers that can cut-open (refactor), create and destroy (god-like powers) and provide real value to customers earning big big money for their employers? I think not. I'm sure there are companies that do tend to forbid new hires (freshly out of school or not) to commit anything until they have been long enough with the company to get what they are doing. But it's not always the case. They are hired to do the job, to be resources, not engineers. They are just numbers that mostly do not add up. But there's hope that not everyone is as mad in their doing as the ones I've just mentioned. There's the opensource community that follows exactly the kind of path that it should. You start small, familiarize yourself with the code, maybe submit a patch or two, become a contributor first, gain the trust of other team members and finally if you prove yourself worthy you get the commit access. By the time you get it you'd do harsh things to people for causing harm to the project. I wonder why people do put the information about being a commiter to some opensource project on their CV.. Interesting, isn't it?
More than anything else one needs to remember that software development is about learning and practicing. It's not always something new you need to learn. A lot of times it is something really, really old. Without knowing and above all without practicing it is not possible to "beherrschen" something. Nobody was born with the ability to drive an F1 car. You might "feel it" but you need to train to be good at it. You do need to get your hands dirty!
Have a nice weekend!
If you're young, in Poland it'd be under 18 years old, you don't technically get to drive a car without adult supervision. That's pure theory nowadays but at least that's how it should be. Being young and funky gets lots of stupid ideas into your head like driving over 100km/h in town chasing a friend without knowing the road ahead. Been there, done that. It doesn't mean I was in my right mind when I did it.
There are places where being wild is good. Certainly things where life is at stake are not the kind of ones where you'd expect one to go all in without training but that's what is actually happening all the time. People (including me) are by definition reckless and unpredictable and nothing is going to change that. There's a reason for that: had we been reasonable all the time no big discoveries would have happened. We wouldn't know about the continents of America, we most probably wouldn't know that radiation is actually bad and finally we'd probably die of hunger had there been no brave hunters risking their lives to master hunting animals.
In today's modern world however we do have the opportunity to make less mistakes - at least less of those obvious ones. And with that let me present you with a definition of two words in German:
Verfügen über - to have the knowledge about something, used in the sense "I do have a driving license"
Beherrschen - to have the ability to do something, used in the sense "I do know how to drive a car"
With those two there's little difference, right? Usually if you do have a driving license you should be capable enough to drive a car. But can you? Is that really what is going on?
Let's try to apply that to software development for a moment. It is obvious you need to study to get the diploma to be a software developer. But does it mean you can do software with it? Can you actually make a living with it? As it turns out yes, you can. The discipline is so vast and by all means so naively taken by so many companies that the moment you step out of school you're ready to go, hot shot! You are the man with the skills. But are you?
In my experience with young graduates and with students it was seldom the case when a young developer right after school was really ready to go. Actually I know only two people that when they came to work at a company with me I felt respect for the wealth of knowledge and humility for things they don't know. And so far it was just the two people I know this far that were open to the suggestion to learn new stuff. There's been sooo many cases where the lack of will to learn new technical skills was demonstrated along with arrogance (not to be confused with confidence) I couldn't even count.
The worst thing about it is they really do get hired! And believe me when I say there are companies where a fresh graduate hired almost off-the-shelve gets the ability to flush the project they are working on literally down the toilette. That means a very young in terms of experience person gets commit access to software that costs hundreds, sometimes even millions of dollars! And we're not talking sporadically - it's how certain companies operate! There's a saying that "there's no person that can't be replaced with a finite number of students". That's how the new markets for software developers came to be.
Obviously in every rule there are exceptions. I know that in the area there are maybe 15%-25% people that really get what software development is all about. And that's actually a very good ratio considering that software development has been announced one of the best paid jobs for graduates and is also viewed as one of the easiest ones in terms of rules.
Yes, rules... What kind of rules are there?
Among those professions I just mentioned there's an MD and a lawyer. Once you're done with your study you don't get to cut-open anybody for any reason, right? You need to gain practice under a trained eye of someone with that experience already there. Otherwise nobody would trust you with a knife doing god knows what to the body of a living soul! Same thing with lawyers. I hope you catch my drift here.
But is it like this with software developers? Do they need to undergo a practice to get certified as software developers that can cut-open (refactor), create and destroy (god-like powers) and provide real value to customers earning big big money for their employers? I think not. I'm sure there are companies that do tend to forbid new hires (freshly out of school or not) to commit anything until they have been long enough with the company to get what they are doing. But it's not always the case. They are hired to do the job, to be resources, not engineers. They are just numbers that mostly do not add up. But there's hope that not everyone is as mad in their doing as the ones I've just mentioned. There's the opensource community that follows exactly the kind of path that it should. You start small, familiarize yourself with the code, maybe submit a patch or two, become a contributor first, gain the trust of other team members and finally if you prove yourself worthy you get the commit access. By the time you get it you'd do harsh things to people for causing harm to the project. I wonder why people do put the information about being a commiter to some opensource project on their CV.. Interesting, isn't it?
More than anything else one needs to remember that software development is about learning and practicing. It's not always something new you need to learn. A lot of times it is something really, really old. Without knowing and above all without practicing it is not possible to "beherrschen" something. Nobody was born with the ability to drive an F1 car. You might "feel it" but you need to train to be good at it. You do need to get your hands dirty!
Have a nice weekend!
Friday, January 6, 2012
The alchemy of software development - part two
In this installment let me walk you through the valley of shadows nobody using computers wants to look at. Let’s have a look at what creating software feels like, what it actually is and why at the end of the day you should care how it’s done.
Software isn’t some forbidden science. It might be hard to understand by mare mortals but it definitely is not something that you can’t do even if you’re not very much into it. But should you? How does it feel like to be a software developer?
Imagine you have this completely obedient servant ready to do everything without hesitation. You tell it to jump of a 100-story building without parachute and it does it. Right down on its face. Splash! Boom! There’s blood everywhere, harsh words,... But nobody cares - it was your servant and you have had complete control over him. The ultimate power! That’s you and the machine. And programmers do that sort of things every minute of every day when they create software. Up to the point when they figure out that the servant lives longer when he has a parachute that actually opens. Sometimes the servant goes haywire and does things the developer does not expect him to do. Suddenly he might refuse to jump even when all the precautions are in place and ready to go. Jump! Jump! Damn it! Then a moment of revelation happens: the developer instructed the servant not to jump if it’s raining, which makes perfect sense. He just didn’t realize the definition of rain was actually not very precise.
The problem with your servant is that he understands only a very specific language. That language has only two words: a zero (0) and a one (1). Fortunately enough scientists realized that ages ago and created human-to-servant translators called compilers. Other mad scientists though that telling your servant to jump without parachute is a bad idea all along and created safe nets forbidding you to do that at all. That’s how runtime environments like Java or .NET came to be... All of the sudden your servant isn’t so obedient anymore. He has more than one master now and your word means nothing compared to the rules enforced by “The Creator”, be it the one that taught you and your servant to communicate or the one that thinks you’re complete moron that needs to be controlled as much as possible.
In the center of all this there’s the programmer. But he’s not alone! There comes the light at the end of the tunnel! The new hope! The solution to every problem he has ever had.. Miracle! A new technology has been created that is supposed to take the pressure of his back. It’s not a few moments later when he realizes that the light he saw was actually coming from a train heading his way and he starts feeling much more like he was before.
The battle continues. Things are getting complicated because some other programmer comes in. The new guy might actually help but he doesn’t speak the language. Well, they both speak English but in a different way. They have different opinions about the side of the building the servant should be jumping from. Finally they agree that going from a corner makes the most sense. After all it’s the fact of landing that counts, right? It’s not the fact of flying itself (even though the most interesting one) but the safe landing that the crowd will observe. So it even makes sense to go a bit crazy and to tell the servant to wait until he’s about half the way through to open the parachute. This way the crowd will be even better entertained and get the result quicker.
There’s that one last thing the team didn’t take into account. The original developer left and with him the original reason for the servant to exist. He was the one knowing all the why’s and how’s about the jump. The rest (and now there’s like a 100 people working the servant) tries really hard to overcome all the tangled cords. Some of the Gordian knots can’t be solved so they cut them out replacing them with new ones, of a different nature, or even leaving the parachute crippled counting on the fact that the remaining strings will still do the job.
Of course since there’s a huge group of developers some of them are more aware of the actual power they have and others don’t. People are different and that’s actually a good thing. From variety comes evolution, right? Well... If you want to jump on a parachute you wouldn’t put your life in the hands of some young inexperienced fast-food assistant, right? After all he knows nothing about jumping! But hey, that’s what happens all the time! After all how the young will learn if not by killing the servant just a couple of hundred times more? That’s not something the more experienced developers like so they manifest their position very strongly. They say they need to be treated like professionals because they “know”. They create manifests, meet to grizzle about colours of the parachute when at the same time their younger colleagues help the servant meet his destiny a couple times more. The servant has many masters. He tries to listen to all of them but there’s just to many. He becomes the hooker trying to fulfill everyone’s dream...
At the end of all this no one knows why the servant needed to jump. That’s perfectly normal and to be expected. The beauty of software development though is that there’s now a servant on every single tall building because everyone wants to have one! It doesn’t matter if you sell condoms or make cars... Just make the freak jump! We need this!
Hope you’ve enjoyed the trip!
Software isn’t some forbidden science. It might be hard to understand by mare mortals but it definitely is not something that you can’t do even if you’re not very much into it. But should you? How does it feel like to be a software developer?
Imagine you have this completely obedient servant ready to do everything without hesitation. You tell it to jump of a 100-story building without parachute and it does it. Right down on its face. Splash! Boom! There’s blood everywhere, harsh words,... But nobody cares - it was your servant and you have had complete control over him. The ultimate power! That’s you and the machine. And programmers do that sort of things every minute of every day when they create software. Up to the point when they figure out that the servant lives longer when he has a parachute that actually opens. Sometimes the servant goes haywire and does things the developer does not expect him to do. Suddenly he might refuse to jump even when all the precautions are in place and ready to go. Jump! Jump! Damn it! Then a moment of revelation happens: the developer instructed the servant not to jump if it’s raining, which makes perfect sense. He just didn’t realize the definition of rain was actually not very precise.
The problem with your servant is that he understands only a very specific language. That language has only two words: a zero (0) and a one (1). Fortunately enough scientists realized that ages ago and created human-to-servant translators called compilers. Other mad scientists though that telling your servant to jump without parachute is a bad idea all along and created safe nets forbidding you to do that at all. That’s how runtime environments like Java or .NET came to be... All of the sudden your servant isn’t so obedient anymore. He has more than one master now and your word means nothing compared to the rules enforced by “The Creator”, be it the one that taught you and your servant to communicate or the one that thinks you’re complete moron that needs to be controlled as much as possible.
In the center of all this there’s the programmer. But he’s not alone! There comes the light at the end of the tunnel! The new hope! The solution to every problem he has ever had.. Miracle! A new technology has been created that is supposed to take the pressure of his back. It’s not a few moments later when he realizes that the light he saw was actually coming from a train heading his way and he starts feeling much more like he was before.
The battle continues. Things are getting complicated because some other programmer comes in. The new guy might actually help but he doesn’t speak the language. Well, they both speak English but in a different way. They have different opinions about the side of the building the servant should be jumping from. Finally they agree that going from a corner makes the most sense. After all it’s the fact of landing that counts, right? It’s not the fact of flying itself (even though the most interesting one) but the safe landing that the crowd will observe. So it even makes sense to go a bit crazy and to tell the servant to wait until he’s about half the way through to open the parachute. This way the crowd will be even better entertained and get the result quicker.
There’s that one last thing the team didn’t take into account. The original developer left and with him the original reason for the servant to exist. He was the one knowing all the why’s and how’s about the jump. The rest (and now there’s like a 100 people working the servant) tries really hard to overcome all the tangled cords. Some of the Gordian knots can’t be solved so they cut them out replacing them with new ones, of a different nature, or even leaving the parachute crippled counting on the fact that the remaining strings will still do the job.
Of course since there’s a huge group of developers some of them are more aware of the actual power they have and others don’t. People are different and that’s actually a good thing. From variety comes evolution, right? Well... If you want to jump on a parachute you wouldn’t put your life in the hands of some young inexperienced fast-food assistant, right? After all he knows nothing about jumping! But hey, that’s what happens all the time! After all how the young will learn if not by killing the servant just a couple of hundred times more? That’s not something the more experienced developers like so they manifest their position very strongly. They say they need to be treated like professionals because they “know”. They create manifests, meet to grizzle about colours of the parachute when at the same time their younger colleagues help the servant meet his destiny a couple times more. The servant has many masters. He tries to listen to all of them but there’s just to many. He becomes the hooker trying to fulfill everyone’s dream...
At the end of all this no one knows why the servant needed to jump. That’s perfectly normal and to be expected. The beauty of software development though is that there’s now a servant on every single tall building because everyone wants to have one! It doesn’t matter if you sell condoms or make cars... Just make the freak jump! We need this!
Hope you’ve enjoyed the trip!
Modern state of software development - part one
Throughout the history the software industry has undergone a number of changes in moods, best practices, reinventions of the wheel, reincarnation of old ideas and sunset of countless technologies. Looking back at what has happened in the last two decades in both software development as well as software complexity is really astonishing.
The evolution has truly changed the world as we know it. The foretold End Of The World “scheduled” for this year by Mayan calendar is actually a work in progress. The world as our parents knew it doesn’t exist anymore. Cars are capable of performing maneuvers one had to learn alone (like parking) and it doesn’t take The Great Oracle to be almost certain that in the near future controlling a car will become obsolete all together. Same thing with TV sets becoming not a view-only experience but communication centres, refrigerators controlling the state of food by (almost) themselves or finally cell phones being sold without the capability to make phone calls but with a 24/7 Internet connectivity. All those things exist because there’s a need and all of them are driven by software.
Since the early 70’s the software industry is the single, most energetic part of our western society. The only other one capable of keeping up is its twin brother, the hardware industry. But even hardware is designed with software these days. Ironic, is it not?
In the middle of that is the most incredible, demanding and abstract profession out there, a program writer. Oh wait - we’re not program writers anymore! We are software developers!
That brings me to the merit of this blog series: what is actually software development? Is it really a profession, like a carpenter or shoemaker? A shoe is something I can wear, right? It’s a real thing made of real components. I can use a table made by some carpenter to have the evening meal with my family. Or maybe it’s more like a T-Shirt? But can I touch the software?
Certainly you can have fun with it! Games are the biggest time devourer ever :) I'd argue that if it wasn't for computer games the whole computerization wouldn't take place at all. It's through games that we have shed the fears of our parents about a computer being the Satan's tool of mass destruction. Who knows? Maybe they were right? The fact however remains unchanged that current generation of western civilization can't live without computers. And computers need software...
Have a nice day!
The evolution has truly changed the world as we know it. The foretold End Of The World “scheduled” for this year by Mayan calendar is actually a work in progress. The world as our parents knew it doesn’t exist anymore. Cars are capable of performing maneuvers one had to learn alone (like parking) and it doesn’t take The Great Oracle to be almost certain that in the near future controlling a car will become obsolete all together. Same thing with TV sets becoming not a view-only experience but communication centres, refrigerators controlling the state of food by (almost) themselves or finally cell phones being sold without the capability to make phone calls but with a 24/7 Internet connectivity. All those things exist because there’s a need and all of them are driven by software.
Since the early 70’s the software industry is the single, most energetic part of our western society. The only other one capable of keeping up is its twin brother, the hardware industry. But even hardware is designed with software these days. Ironic, is it not?
In the middle of that is the most incredible, demanding and abstract profession out there, a program writer. Oh wait - we’re not program writers anymore! We are software developers!
That brings me to the merit of this blog series: what is actually software development? Is it really a profession, like a carpenter or shoemaker? A shoe is something I can wear, right? It’s a real thing made of real components. I can use a table made by some carpenter to have the evening meal with my family. Or maybe it’s more like a T-Shirt? But can I touch the software?
Certainly you can have fun with it! Games are the biggest time devourer ever :) I'd argue that if it wasn't for computer games the whole computerization wouldn't take place at all. It's through games that we have shed the fears of our parents about a computer being the Satan's tool of mass destruction. Who knows? Maybe they were right? The fact however remains unchanged that current generation of western civilization can't live without computers. And computers need software...
Have a nice day!
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
jQuery and posing JSON data to the server
Today a good friend of mine asked me how to post JSON data to the json-rest-api plugin using jQuery. As it turned out using
Well it's not impossible but very inconvenient if you have to do it a lot. First you need to use the
The last part can be done using
Parameters are exactly the same with the single difference that the default expected data format is "json", which makes sense if you're working with JSON services.
Happy coding!
$.post() doesn't do the trick...Well it's not impossible but very inconvenient if you have to do it a lot. First you need to use the
$.ajax() method, not the $.post() one. Secondly you need to specify the contentType parameter for the receiver to be notified that the data is in that format. And last but not least it is crucial to properly serialize your object to string.The last part can be done using
JSON.stringify() but writing this over and over again is painful. Here's a gist (raw) you can use that adds a sister version of $.post called $.postJSON that does exactly the same thing as the original one but sends data in JSON format instead of form post.Parameters are exactly the same with the single difference that the default expected data format is "json", which makes sense if you're working with JSON services.
Happy coding!
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
Grails, Heroku and spring-security-core
This one is going to be quick, but made me spent almost 2 hours to google it...
If you install the spring-security-core plugin and want to deploy your application o Heroku you'll end up with a nasty-looking exception like this:
java.lang.IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found: Are you referring to request attributes outside of an actual web request, or processing a request outside of the originally receiving thread? If you are actually operating within a web request and still receive this message, your code is probably running outside of DispatcherServlet/DispatcherPortlet: In this case, use RequestContextListener or RequestContextFilter to expose the current request.
If you google for No thread-bound request found you'll find some Jira issues that'll tell you pretty much nothing besides that it is a Grails issue.
Among other search results is also this one stating that the actual issue is with the webxml plugin being snatched in the wrong version and that you need to force Grails to use the right one like this:
See ya!
If you install the spring-security-core plugin and want to deploy your application o Heroku you'll end up with a nasty-looking exception like this:
java.lang.IllegalStateException: No thread-bound request found: Are you referring to request attributes outside of an actual web request, or processing a request outside of the originally receiving thread? If you are actually operating within a web request and still receive this message, your code is probably running outside of DispatcherServlet/DispatcherPortlet: In this case, use RequestContextListener or RequestContextFilter to expose the current request.
If you google for No thread-bound request found you'll find some Jira issues that'll tell you pretty much nothing besides that it is a Grails issue.
Among other search results is also this one stating that the actual issue is with the webxml plugin being snatched in the wrong version and that you need to force Grails to use the right one like this:
BuildConfig.groovy:
compile ":webxml:1.4.1"See ya!
Edit 2012-04-05
As of Thu Dec 22 22:35:30 2011 -0500 Burt has upgraded to webxml-1.4.1 so you shouldn't experience this problem anymore.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Grails routing plugin family updated
It's about time the routing plugin providing EIP functionality for Grails be updated to work with the latest version of Grails which at the time of writing is 2.0.0.RC3. And so today the plugin has been updated to 1.1.4-SNAPSHOT with the plan to release 1.1.4 by the time Grails 2.0.0 final will be out.
Here are the highlights of 1.1.4-SNAPSHOT:
Also the example project has undergone some extensive upgrade:
The last feature is a response to an issue posted on GitHub that had to do with providing access to services from processors which Camel is already capable of - it just requires some additional work but it is so not without reason.
I hope you'll enjoy!
Here are the highlights of 1.1.4-SNAPSHOT:
- Apache Camel core libraries updated to 2.9.0-RC1 (with the plan to upgrade to 2.9.0 final once it gets out)
- Apache ActiveMQ (routing-jms plugin) upgraded to 5.5.1
Also the example project has undergone some extensive upgrade:
- rewrite from ground up with Grails 2.0.0.RC3 (so all the bells and whistles like resource plugin and webxml plugin are there)
- extended the example route with an example of processor that's defined as Spring bean.
The last feature is a response to an issue posted on GitHub that had to do with providing access to services from processors which Camel is already capable of - it just requires some additional work but it is so not without reason.
I hope you'll enjoy!
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