I’ve tried a few different sandwiches at Homegrown since they opened. I like their concept and I want to like their food, but every time I’ve been underwhelmed and felt a bit ripped off.
This week, I tried their Po’Boy. For over $10, I got two tiny pieces of fried fish with a little spicy mayo on a roll and a tiny bit of over-spiced slaw in a cup. The fish seemed fresh, but was relatively tasteless and the tiny swipe of spicy mayo didn’t help much. The fish portions were small enough that there was an ocean of bread left over on the small roll it was served on.
Yesterday’s experience has been fairly representative of the food there. I’ll add that I usually take out rather than eat there. At lunch time the place can be quite busy and it is organized rather poorly since there isn’t a place to wait and not be in the way. So you often get a gaggle of people standing in the areas around the tables or where you order and pick up the food getting in each others way.
Homegrown seems to be succeeding, but I’m not sure it is because of their food or their concept. If they cut their prices by 20-30% and reconfigured their space a bit, I might like this place a lot better. You can certainly eat better for the same amount of money without having to look too far and that is what I will continue to do.
Peter Wilson spoke at Ignite Seattle last night (How do I keep missing these?!?). Having been a senior dude at both Microsoft and Google, he has some true insider perspective on each. It is through the lens of what he cares about (cloud computing), it does have some good perspective. What is interesting to me as a former softie myself is that while he doesn’t say anything horrible about either place he definitely seems to still be a lot more supportive of his more recent employer than his previous one. While I love the concept of the Ignite talk being limited to 5 minutes, I would have really liked to hear more on this topic. Maybe he’ll do a longer version at some other local tech meet-up that I’ll completely miss as well
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One of the sessions that I was really looking forward to seeing at MAX was Grant Skinner’s “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know.” I’ve really been inspired by some of his work and although I’d seen his slides (they are posted on his site), I wanted to see him present it. I’m hoping that they will post a video of it on Adobe TV, because I got a lot more out of watching it than I did by just reading the slides.
The Actionscript and Flash parts were the main draw for me, but I actually got a kick out of the software architecture and software engineering-ish slides as well. He ended up presenting a nice overview of some of the core of software engineering and development in a succinct and easy to understand way. I would certainly recommend this talk to the folks in the community without formal training, especially as a gateway to finding areas to learn more. I think as more and more experienced developers with formal software training move into RIA development with Actionscript, you’ll start to see the general level of software quality in the community rise (especially if the new-to-Actionscript developers embrace the sharing ethos of the greater community).
I didn’t agree with all of his edicts – especially about commenting, documentation and some of his personal coding guidelines, but those were pretty minor quibbles with a really great talk.
I also have to give him big props for his Flash-movie-as-slide-deck. A lot of times, I’ve seen developers create their own slide software as an intellectual exercise which all-too-often results in presentations that look a lot worse than powerpoint templates. His deck worked well, looked good, and was cool without being too distracting.
At the beginning of the presentation there is a quote from Dune that I hadn’t seen before. I grabbed a longer version of it here from one of his other posts.
‘Above all else, the [architect] must be a generalist, not a specialist. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The [architect] on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his [application]. He must remain capable of saying “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The [architect]-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our [application] is merely part of a larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the [architect]-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?”‘
- From Children of Dune by Frank Herbert (1976)
I’ve written this function a zillion times, so I decided to post it on my blog. Yes, it could do more error checking (what if that new returns a NULL? what if an exception is thrown?). But it does more than zero error checking, so there you go. This is super useful if you are getting ANSI code paths from legacy APIs or if you are using boost::filesystem::path to store paths in a platform independent way (until the new boost comes out).
This particular version isn’t battle tested (yet), but it does work.
On a separate note, I like snipt, but I wish they had better mechanisms to allow you to own your snippets without handing over login info to other sites.
