Here I am, back at blogging again! The story so far Back in 2001, I had a small blog that was using FogCreek CityDesk. I was using the blog to share random thoughts (as one was wont to do), including programming ideas. I was in my mid twenties back then and eagerly looked for opportunities to make a dent in the world :-). I wrote my last blog there on 2002/04/22, leaving behind plenty of unfinished work like this Back to Basics series of articles about XML.

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. Everything starts with a slice of the Web, in the guise of a bunch of RSS feeds. Currently my blog roll hover a little above 280 feeds. There are the broad blockbusters like Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, Techmeme, Presse-Citron (a French blog), the mainstream media (e.g. French newspapers), but there are also a lot of small, specialized, “vertical” blogs from developers, entrepreneurs, competitors and/or friends.

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. My life as a developer : Update : it’s my life as a professional developer, since my life as a programmer began in 1983 on a Sinclair ZX81… 1995 : Java 1.0 beta is released. I begin playing with it. Hotjava browser, applets are all the rage. Soon after, the infamous « Loading Java » status bar message in Netscape is the signal that you’ll loose control of your browser for at least 15 seconds while the JVM loads an applet.

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. For my currently biggest project at work, I’ve decided to get back in the flow and write the code in Java. These are a few reasons why I chose to use Java instead of Python for this particular occasion : Performance. I literaly have to parse gigabytes of fixed-width formatted data, perform business logic and computation on it, then spit ou millions of rows in output files and in RDBMSes.

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. C++ inventor Bjarne Stroustrup describes the next version of the C++ standard. For all the coolness that this next version is supposed to introduce (no, it’s not the name), nothing is said about what seems to me the biggest issue of the C/C++ world, namely the diversity of build standards. C++ is a pretty tough language with a zillion built-in ways to shoot yourself in the foot.

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. From 2000 to 2002, I was working at Ubicco, a Fi System spin-off dedicated to mobile phone services. We developed an application server and framework that was supposed to make your life easy when you wanted to build WAP / iMode / cHTML / SMS applications. Back in those days, I was pretty active on the xml-dev mailing list, so when on 11/03/2002 someone asked “What happened to WAP ?

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. This is a copy of an email I sent to Elliotte Rusty Harold Hi Elliotte, First of all, since it’s the first time I mail you, I want to thank you for your two sites, Cafe au Lait and Cafe con Leche, since I read them since forever (well, since 2000, maybe before). I even was Quote of the Day once, which I was very proud of (it was when I thought that participating to xml-dev could actually change something to the way XML evolved).

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. Edmin Martin wrote Why PHP sucks. At work I’ve built an Apache 2.0 setup with both PHP and mod_python support. We are progressively stopping our developments in PHP and switching them to Python. Of course in the past I’ve been developing in Java ; but for quick developments nothing beats scripting languages. Anyway, I’ve been quickly convinced that PHP is a pretty awful language, except for two things :

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. When I type </, the last opened tag is closed, and the cursor is positioned after the closing tag. The editor can be switched from whitespaces sensitive to whitespaces insensitive. In the first mode, whitespaces are kept and displayed. In the second mode they are discarded, but the document is presented and saved in a nice indented way (a few intelligent pretty-printing rules can really make an XML document more readable).

NOTE: This is a restored version from this archive. (This text was originally posted on the xml-dev mailing list, in this message) I think that data has no meaning if there is nothing to process the data. A book has no meaning if there is no one to read it. When reading a book, the meaning is recreated from the text in the reader’s mind, but the meaning is nowhere in the book, just in the writer’s and the reader’s brains (there is often a difference between the writer’s ideas and their reproduction in the reader’s mind).