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ex machina


so maybe i'm not so misguided afterall. a few days ago, i professed my confusion as to why the joel was declaring the groove gang to be "mere" architectural astronauts. to me - it seems apparent that groove is playing a game with a rule that says you can't compete with the people you are trying to sell to - namely, VARs and professional services orgs that are actually trying "...to enable things that people really need."

well - hugh pyle, the director of technology for agora professional services, which hosts groovelog, says basically the same thing, but with a little more imagination:
"Elegant software design is all about putting together simple things in simple ways which have unpredictable - and endlessly complex - uses. The main tool in a software architect's kitbag is abstraction. Occam's razor. The best software designers sometimes take this to extremes (see [4], and Ray's comment "Groove, in essence, distributes *method calls* as opposed to data" in [5]). These are the astronauts. Their "absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures" are really more like new building blocks, new elements. Alone these elements are pretty useless. But they're powerful.

Now, I'm not an astronaut; I don't even like heights. But I love synthesis: pick up two or three things and smush them together to make something new. My sort of software design - applications and systems architectures - almost never involves creating anything completely new, or anything down-to-the-metal. But when you get to put together other people's building blocks, it's very easy to make smart things happen. Applications which change the way a company does business. These are Agora's stock-in-trade."
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4/24/2001 09:33:00 PM 0 comments

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"it is hard to be brave," said piglet, sniffing slightly, "when you're only a Very Small Animal." rabbit, who had begun to write very busily, looked up and said: "it is because you are a very small animal that you will be Useful in the adventure before us."

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this site chronicles the continuing adventures of my son, odin, who was unexpectedly born on the fourth of july at 25 weeks gestation, weighing 1 pound 7 ounces.

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