Underground Standards

It is interesting to see how the software industry is moving away from a model of open standards ruling the day to what I will call underground standards (e.g. Spring, REST, Hibernate, XMPP). The underground standards appear to evolve with a key driving principal, simplicity. This reminds me of something someone told me when I was at MIT. If a computer scientist designed the web, it would have been too complex and never adopted. As computer scientists we need to keep working to simplify, simplify, simplify everything we design and build.

Some facts to think about:

• Spring reached 10k downloads in one month
• 87% of Amazon API users use the REST over SOAP
• EJB 3.0 is borrowing a lot of ideas from Hibernate
• Google Talk is using XMPP
  

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

I came across Principles behind the Agile Manifesto and loved these principals. I have worked on a number of projects that swung from formal to cowboy development. Regardless of the process these principals I feel will yield a good end result that developers can be proud of.

Montreal - Great City

My wife (Randa) and I spent a few days this week in Montreal helping my little brother (Nabil) move into McGill. I have to tell you, a fun city. We have been up there 3 times this year and always seemed to find lots of outdoor events by virtue of walking around the city. The nice thing about it is that people of all ages participate and it is never too crowded..

If you are up there remember to drop by Amir's and grab a chicken shwarma. It is the best I have had outside of the middle east..

To make a long story short, my brother is all settled in and we had a great time doing it...

Watch Me Change

Came across this website (www.watchmechange.com) and could not stop laughing.. A cleaver advertising campaign by Gap..

Welcome to my Blog

This is my first post.. more to come later