Old 2.0 (I've got more; stop me if you've heard them before.)

Busting some myths that have sprung up around Scala.

Artima's first published book, Programming in Scala, made its bookstore debut last week at the Devoxx conference in Antwerp, Belgium, where it sold out. Twice.

They goad you into "Standard Edition" but once you change, you can't go back. No matter how bad it is. Change at your peril.

After a few weeks of work, version 3 of the decorator module is finally out. The new version is a major rewrite of the original implementation, lots of things have been improved under the hood, and the documentation has had a major overhaul too. The module is hosted on the PyPI site: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/decorator.

Publicly-held corporations ostensibly serve the people they sell products to, but are required by law to actually serve their shareholders. Privately-held companies only serve the customer.

James Ward (Adobe evangelist for Flex) and I have coauthored a book to rapidly bring programmers into the world of Flex. Our primary intent was to make the book small (only 140 pages), with short, pithy chapters, to lower the hurdles to learning this powerful GUI system.

I will be giving two presentations at the annual conference of Javagruppen, the Danish Java user group, January 9-10 at the Hindsgavl Castle.

I am asking the users of my decorator module if they would accept a new version breaking backward compatibility in a minor way.

Episode #12 closed my second cycle of Adventures. There will be a third cycle. However, now I have to write everything from scratch instead of translating from my original Italian series, therefore the publication rate will slow down. Here is some anticipation about the future.

I was visiting my friend Zack Urlocker and he did this 6-minute video interview for his column at InfoWorld.

Perhaps we only commit big chunks at a time as an artifact of older version control systems. What if we treated it as a full-fledged undo facility?

In this episode I discuss the utility of macros for enterprise programmers.

Floyd Marinescu asked me to organize an open-spaces session at the QCon Conference in San Francisco. I learned interesting things at both open spaces and regular sessions.

We recently moved "Python 3 Patterns & Idioms" from Launchpad to BitBucket. Here's why.