March of Progress

Posted by: Howard Lewis Ship on 02/22/2010

Or should that be "Late February of Progress". I have to say I'm a bit envious right now of Rich Hickey ... I can see that he's continuing on like a steam roller, extending and improving Clojure. I guess he's having some success in generating Research and Design budget from funding companies. I can see, following his threads, that he's working on yet more concurrency metaphors for Clojure, which is a good thing (though eventually there'll need to be a big book just to describe them all).

I'm on a different track, in that I fund Tapestry out of pocket while doing training and project work. In some cases, those merge, such as when I add specific features to Tapestry for a specific client.

I'm of two minds here: doing project work keeps me grounded in real requirements for Tapestry. I see what works really well, and what needs some polishing. On the other hand, I come up with ideas for new components, improvements, and integrations all the time and barely have enough free time (between clients, ordinary Tapestry maintenance, and this special project) to even document my ideas, never mind implement, test and distribute them.

So, should I set up a funding option like Rich's? Well, that wouldn't help my current clients (I'm committed to getting their apps into production), but it may change how I would look for future work.


About Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is respected in the Java community as an expert on web application development, dependency injection, Java meta-programming, and developer productivity. He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, NoFluffJustStuff, ApacheCon and other conferences, and the author of "Tapestry in Action" for Manning (covering Tapestry 3.0). Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work as well as training in Clojure. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his son, Jacob.

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