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Frank La Vigne (Free subscription) | 23/09/2008
Alex Barnett explains the origins of ADO.NET Data Services in this blog post When I first heard the technology, it was still using known by its code name: Astoria. Naturally, I thought it was somehow named after the neighborhood in Queens, NY . I was wrong: It was named for Astoria, Oregon. When it came to brainstorming the code name, the team agreed on a "cloud" theme. A number of proposals were...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 22/09/2008
Firstly - thanks to everyone who has reached out to me in the last three weeks via email, phone calls and comments since I shared the news of my leaving Bungee Labs - I have really appreciated everyone's support and interest in my next steps. The great news is I'll be joining Intuit as a Group Manager working in a fast growing start-up team responsible for leading the company's Platform-As-a-Service...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 28/08/2008
Well, the great Bungee Jump has come. Martin Plaehn, CEO of Bungee Labs has shared the news of the company the letting go of 15 regular employees and contractors . Unfortunately, I am among this set of affected Bungee Labs employees. Yup, it's a blow, a nasty, but a necessary blow, but if the company is to give itself a fighting chance of making it beyond the short term, then the reduction in team...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 21/08/2008
Pablo Castro has recounted some of his timelined memories about how "Project Astoria" evolved from a lunch time conversation to bits in .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 now known as ADO.NET Data Services Framework ). Nice write up. Three memories of my own to add to the story: 1. I was reading up on the whole REST thing in the summer of 2006 - its origins, philosophy and design patterns. I...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 15/08/2008
About 10 years ago a friend gave to me a book as gift . We were sitting on the deck of a canal boat on a Friday late afternoon set for a weekend of lazy meandering with friends and family along the Thames, when he handed me his own copy of Godel, Escher, Bach . "You'll love this" he said. Willem was was right. Godel, Escher, Bach not only tickled my penchant for self-referentialism and recursion (...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 08/08/2008
I'll be taking part in one of the Cloud computing panels at Web 2.0 Expo New York this September, details below. If you want to meet up, let me know. Building in the Clouds: Scaling Web 2.0 Jason Hoffman (Joyent, Inc.), Alistair Croll (Bitcurrent), Alex Barnett (Bungee Labs), Dwight Merriman (10gen), Jinesh Varia (Amazon Web Services) 10:30am - 11:20am Thursday, 09/18/2008 Performance & Scaling Location:...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 25/07/2008
Two new interview podcasts to share (recorded by me and Ted ) for the Bungee Line: Nate Bowler, CTO of @Task @task (or AtTask ) is a Utah-based tech company providing a comprehensive, web-based project and portfolio-management package delivered in both a SaaS and on-premise model with a very rich web API set . We talked with Nate about the evolution of their web services design and @Task's future...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 19/06/2008
Three videos that made me think: How it feels to have a stroke (TED Talks) Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 16/05/2008
About a year ago, I took part in a meeting where the question: "What does open source "mean" in a SaaS world?" came up in conversation. A year later, that same question is becoming increasingly pertinent as the IT industry's move to Software-as-a-Service ( SaaS ) and cloud-based computing accelerates. For Bungee Labs (I work there), where we provide an entire platform-as-a-service ( PaaS ) developers...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 09/05/2008
I'm thoroughly enjoying David Weinberger 's Everything Is Miscellaneous (The Power of the New Digital Disorder). Weinberger has a canny knack for taking a subject matter I feel I'm already familiar with and yet illuminating and expressing facets of it in such a way as to greatly further and deepen my understanding of it. I'm storing the following quote from the chapters "Lumps and Splits" as I'm sure...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 07/05/2008
Here's some classic Raymond Chen: "Apparently I've been promoted by mistake all these years".
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 03/05/2008
I spent some time this morning watching the Charlie Rose interview with Wired's editor, Chris Anderson , discussing FREE . The interview covers the economics and ideas driving the Internet's current (and future) state: the Gift Economy ; the Attention Economy ; and the Reputation Economy . Rose leads the conversation into topics such as covering the Freemium business model and consumer perceptions...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 01/05/2008
Although I made it to Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week, I didn't make it to a session Matt McAlister blogged about by Twitter’s Alex Payne and Michael Migurski of Stamen Design who presented learnings from the perspective of an API provider. But I can see the slide deck discussing the Twitter API and so can you: | View | Upload your own
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 29/04/2008
As I've come learn while living in the US, the American English language is more efficient than its British English cousin. The difference between the two languages is more than just fonetic phonetic simplification - the general rule seems to be about using fewer letters and words as a whole. Here are some of the examples I've bumped into: American English British English Diff count Links to notes...
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Alexbarnett.net (Free subscription) | 27/04/2008
About four years ago I wrote a post ( on my old blog ) about some of the verbal tics and language use I encountered at Microsoft (memetic habits I inevitably picked up myself). My observations centered around the use of the word "so", example: " So, here’s the thing: do I use the word ‘so’ a little to start a sentence? Absolutely! Do I also like to ask a rhetorical question to make a point? You bet....
