Bubble Foundry

Recently I have posted notices about Equal Networks looking for visualization and Lift and Scala help. Perhaps I was too oblique in my wording, but in my mind “very young startup” means “practically no money.” Several who responded to my postings were looking for well-paid positions, whether contract or as an employee. While I appreciate the interest and the contacts may prove useful once we have lots of money to hire people, these responses are less useful now.

More frustrating are the responses that admit a lack of knowledge in the technologies mentioned (though the honesty is appreciated) and blithly propose that the authors will be able to pick them up extremely quickly. In my Lift posting I specifically mentioned I am looking for someone who knows Scala better than I do.

I don’t care how good a programmer you are, it simply takes a fair amount of time to learn a language’s libraries and common idioms. If Scala is a language you would like to know and think it will not be difficult to learn, spend a day or two learning it before contacting me and then show me how you’ve already mastered it.

Scala is attracting a lot of attention from the Java world and builds off of that language in many, many ways, but extensive Java knowledge does not equal extensive Scala knowledge. Frankly, I think Java is horrible and your extensive time doing it isn’t going to impress me. What will impress me are the projects you’ve worked on, the diversity of languages you know (functional languages are a big plus!), and the fact that you’ve read my posting carefully!

But enough of my complaints. If you DO know Scala and are interested in working on a cool Silicon Valley real-time temperature monitoring startup for equity, drop me a line at peter@equal-networks.com.

Over the past few months I’ve become both more comfortable with Javascript and more impressed with what is possible with the language (more on that, with an example, in a few weeks). Doing lots of work with web application frameworks, I’ve become convinced that writing a framework entirely in Javascript would be both possible and useful. After meeting James Darling at UKGovWeb09 and checking out his Coup De website, I started considering the idea more seriously. I had a free day last Sunday and got coding. The result is jsFrame.

jsFrame is a web framework built entirely upon Javascript, HTML and CSS. It makes heavy use of Prototype.js and unlike some Javascript systems (such as coup-de) it uses the Model-View-Controller pattern and only loads Views as requested. This means that complicated applications are quite simple to develop, though it also means that simple pages take longer to load than they would with a normal website. I am particularly proud of the simply routing system, which is able to handle pretty URLs with a simple .htaccess file and my Javascript code. For more information, check out the demo site.

Non Javascript hackers can take several things away from this: the browser is becoming more and more the basis for rich web applications, and without Flash; network connections can still be a performance bottleneck despite faster connections, particularly on mobile browsers; reasonably advanced web projects can be executed in a short period of time. Oh, and I’m pretty handy with Javascript and web frameworks, and you might want to hire me!