Reality starts catching up with the future again

There's a certain satisfaction when you come in in the morning, and find that GigaOM is now echoing what you've been saying for some time now.

As I was remarking yesterday, the Typesafe Stack looks *really* neat; on further reflection, I think this is a brilliant play to push things to Steam Engine Time. The project just plain makes the Scala/Akka ecosystem look fully *respectable* -- combine that with the power players (eg, Twitter, LinkedIn) that have already been investing in it, and you've got a system that an engineering manager can bring to upper management and say, "This will be our platform". (Doubly so now that I notice that the company has Greylock behind it -- they're one of the more respected VCs, with a good record of backing smart companies.)

Now if they'd only fold Lift into the same download, they'd be ready to take Microsoft Visual Studio on feature-for-feature -- similar to Akka, Lift takes the problem of Web Frameworks, and builds on Scala to take things to a whole new level. Combine it with Akka, and you have a development environment that encourages you to build websites that are horizontally-scalable from the outset. That's compelling: being able to move from garage startup to enterprise-level size without radically changing architectures is -- well, not *quite* unheard-of, but unusual.

Prediction: Microsoft will finally ramp up investment in Axum. This is the .NET equivalent of Akka -- not as mature, but following the same basic principles and ideas. It's been a research project, but now that people are starting to pay attention to this architecture, it would be typical of MS to really dive in...

Reality starts catching up with the future again

There's a certain satisfaction when you come in in the morning, and find that GigaOM is now echoing what you've been saying for some time now.

As I was remarking yesterday, the Typesafe Stack looks *really* neat; on further reflection, I think this is a brilliant play to push things to Steam Engine Time. The project just plain makes the Scala/Akka ecosystem look fully *respectable* -- combine that with the power players (eg, Twitter, LinkedIn) that have already been investing in it, and you've got a system that an engineering manager can bring to upper management and say, "This will be our platform". (Doubly so now that I notice that the company has Greylock behind it -- they're one of the more respected VCs, with a good record of backing smart companies.)

Now if they'd only fold Lift into the same download, they'd be ready to take Microsoft Visual Studio on feature-for-feature -- similar to Akka, Lift takes the problem of Web Frameworks, and builds on Scala to take things to a whole new level. Combine it with Akka, and you have a development environment that encourages you to build websites that are horizontally-scalable from the outset. That's compelling: being able to move from garage startup to enterprise-level size without radically changing architectures is -- well, not *quite* unheard-of, but unusual.

Prediction: Microsoft will finally ramp up investment in Axum. This is the .NET equivalent of Akka -- not as mature, but following the same basic principles and ideas. It's been a research project, but now that people are starting to pay attention to this architecture, it would be typical of MS to really dive in...

You remember my crack about being able to outfit a department store?

Seriously, we're not kidding. Susan gave me the tour last night, and it *takes* a tour: every room in her house is a separate "department". The dining room is full of t-shirts. One bed is covered with jeans. Two rooms have all of their surfaces covered with stacks of sweaters. The downstairs family room is where nightgowns and such live, and the 2-car garage is *completely* full of racks of dresses and suits. Someone made a crack recently about us having a Tardis secretly stuffed into our closets, and as far as I can tell that *must* be true: I haven't the foggiest notion how all of this fit into our house.

Several people have been shy about the idea of taking stuff that others might want, and the reality is that you're not getting the magnitude of this. It took a full 17-foot truck to move all of the clothing to the house. You're doing Susan and me a real favor if you can give some of it a good home, just so there isn't as much to have to wrangle afterwards.

As mentioned before, the giveaway will run tomorrow and Sunday, 10-5 at Susan's. Drop me a line if you need directions, and hope to see you there...

You remember my crack about being able to outfit a department store?

Seriously, we're not kidding. Susan gave me the tour last night, and it *takes* a tour: every room in her house is a separate "department". The dining room is full of t-shirts. One bed is covered with jeans. Two rooms have all of their surfaces covered with stacks of sweaters. The downstairs family room is where nightgowns and such live, and the 2-car garage is *completely* full of racks of dresses and suits. Someone made a crack recently about us having a Tardis secretly stuffed into our closets, and as far as I can tell that *must* be true: I haven't the foggiest notion how all of this fit into our house.

Several people have been shy about the idea of taking stuff that others might want, and the reality is that you're not getting the magnitude of this. It took a full 17-foot truck to move all of the clothing to the house. You're doing Susan and me a real favor if you can give some of it a good home, just so there isn't as much to have to wrangle afterwards.

As mentioned before, the giveaway will run tomorrow and Sunday, 10-5 at Susan's. Drop me a line if you need directions, and hope to see you there...