Posted: July 29th, 2010 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Business, Life | View Comments
So…..been away from this thing for a while. Lots has changed in the interim and I finally feel like blogging again.
I’ll tackle the obvious stuff first. For anyone who doesn’t know I’ve shuttered my consulting company, Hypothetical Labs, in favor of working as a senior developer at Basho Technologies. I joined Basho in January and have really enjoyed working on several releases of Riak.
I’ve cleared my speaking and travel schedule so I have more time for coding and writing. A happy result of this decision is I’m planning a series of articles describing how to build your own distributed application on top of riak_core. riak_core is the heart of Riak and implements cluster membership, data replication and distribution, and hinted handoff among other niceties.
The current plan is to start small and build incrementally with the goal of ending with a complete distributed non-key/value data store. I’ll be releasing the code under the Apache2 license on github as the series progresses. I’m aiming to have the first article up by the end of this week.
Posted: August 23rd, 2009 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Erlang, Life | Comments Off
Wow. I can’t believe it’s been two months — almost to the day — since I’ve written an update here. This summer has been extremely busy for me, but in a good way. I’m happy to report the demand for Erlang expertise is steady and growing here in the ‘States. Month by month I’m seeing and hearing more companies either using Erlang or evaluating Erlang for use on new projects. I think this is a testament to the fine work done by everyone on the OTP team at Ericsson and the stellar quality and temperament of the Erlang community.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with several very enlightened clients who have generously allowed me to open some of my work:
- baberl: A general purpose library for working with languages. baberl contains a linked-in driver for libiconv, pluralization support for English nouns and some verbs, ordinal conversion for numbers (1 -> “1st”), and English ordinate conversions (123 -> “one hundred twenty three”).
- giza: A client library for the Sphinx search engine. giza is known to work with Sphinx 0.9.8.1. and should (fingers crossed) be compatible with other 0.9.8.x versions. It should be regarded as a work-in-progress with the attendant rough edges and bugs.
- markatta: A linked-in driver for the Spidermonkey Javascript engine. markatta will translate datatypes between the two languages to allow a fairly seamless integration. (To be released soon)
If any of these libraries look useful, please give them a spin and send any bug reports my way! For everyone who has already sent me bugs, please be patient and I’ll get to them as soon as I can.
One of the urgent items on my to-do list is to find a better way to manage my time so I can update this blog more regularly. I hope my future updates will be less sporadic.
Posted: April 23rd, 2009 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Life | Comments Off
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back– Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.” — Goethe (maybe)
Today I finally understand this quote and I am at peace.
Posted: April 13th, 2009 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Life | Comments Off
First day back from vacation and I’m already swamped. If I owe you an email reply, especially about my recent post, please bear with me and I’ll get back to you before the end of the week.
It’s good to be busy, especially given the economy but I hate getting behind :(
Posted: January 22nd, 2009 | Author: kevin | Filed under: Life | Comments Off
Yesterday my daughter and I decided to get out and explore our snow covered neighborhood. A couple of our pictures turned out surprisingly well so I thought I’d share them.
This is our neighborhood’s nature trail. The city of Raleigh was forward thinking enough to build a network of nature trails and greenways which connect a large part of the city. This trail starts a few blocks from our house and ends at Shelley Lake.
Near the end of the trail is a creek which feeds into the lake:
We made our way over to the lake where we were treated to a flock of geese landing in the cold water:
You’d never guess from these pictures we live less than 10 minutes from downtown Raleigh.
