Cyrus' World

I’ve created a new blog focused on looking at how technology can help educators.  I also hope to learn from the educational community about what problems they currently face.  

Check it “I Learn Good.”  I’m also tweeting from my alter-ego @ilearngood.

Just got a text message that said “Just got engaged. ;)” from my hero and good friend Justin. I am completely floored so I thought I’d do my best to shame the most extroverted, public person I know.

I can recall several months ago when Justin was sitting in the car and was talking about an incredible young lady he met at an event.  For those that know Justin, you know he talks to a lot of people.  This time was very different, because he followed by saying he thought he’d “met that girl.”  Mind you, my jaded and cynical self nearly crashed my car laughing at this.  I recall telling him to relax and to set reasonable expectations.  I’m sure the earlier conversation was probably about some ridiculous mess I’d gotten myself into.

Within a week they were inseparable.  By three months, they were talking marriage.  For the few, like me, at three months we’re deciding whether a real name is appropriate or we should continue to use aliases (mine is Serpico). Meanwhile, I’m starting to give him tips on jewelry from my experience buying trinkets.  By 7 months, he’s got the ring and I’m trying to pull teeth to know when, where and how.  Well, December 18th, 2010 seems to be the day.

New revelations:

1. Never doubt Justin
2. It’s possible for me to be incorrect

They are both incredible and I’m excited to have more people to harass going forward.  Cheers and all the best Justin!  I look forward to seeing you both on Tuesday.

The last few weeks have been a hodgepodge of tasks to get organized for

 development.  Development started on Monday Nov. 29th.  The goal for the last week was to get the back end running end-to-end.

So here are some of the early development choices:

• JAVA 1.6:  I considered Python or Rails; but after spending some time with both, I didn’t think it was worth giving up my prior experience for the syntactic sugar that either offer.  Great code can be written in any modern language — case closed.
• MongoDB 1.63 Mongo’s document storage model fit very well with how the data is going to be stored.  Still have a significant amount of simulation and load testing to do to see how the heck it handles scaling.  I spent a day with Mongo and a day with Cassandra + Hector and was blown away by Mongo’s simplicity.  Generally, I like more bare bones packages as the bloat often slows the product down, but in this case, I just need to get something out quickly.  Let’s hope this doesn’t bite me in the arse (yeah, I know Scottish).
• Tomcat 7: Tomcat is a reliable web-server, that scales predictably and will fit for what I need now.
• Apache or Nginx: haven’t made a decision which one to go for.  If you have an opinion on why Nginx sucks, please drop a comment.
• ANT: I’m using ANT for building and deploying right now.  I’ve set up the projects based on the recommended Maven setup, but didn’t see the need to be building out an artifact store this early on.  
• SVN: I considered moving to GIT but didn’t see any major benefit to switching.

So, I’ve made my first tag which includes an end-to-end implementation that allows me to add and remove data from the DB.  Some pretty fun annotation-based serialization provided by GSON to the frontend and a custom serialization engine to add entities to Mongo.  I’ve been really religious about test-driven development and haven’t cut any corners yet!

Onward and upward.