Semi-Professional Home Page of TatuSaloranta
Email: <t saloranta AT SPAMFREE gmail DOT com>
Purpose
This home page tracks my public professional activities, outside confidential for-fee work at my current employer. This mostly consists of my Open Source development work. In addition it contains some material that I think might of interest for other software development professionals, like links to articles, references and so forth. Intention is not to act as my personal home page.
On-Going work
Here is on-going professional work I am doing or planning; with rough idea of timings.
Last updated: 25-Mar-2010
Woodstox 4.1:
- Support multi-file-schemas
... and other minor things from Woodstox Jira; to make 4.1 the new stable branch
StaxMate 2.1:
Add convenience features from StaxMate Jira; like ability define default namespaces, add support for more convenient JAXB binding
Aalto 1.0:
- Define asynchronous/non-blocking parsing API
Jackson 1.6:
add features from [JacksonRelease16 | 1.6 plan]; specifically including cool things like "materialized interfaces" and "parent/child linkage handling"
Java Uuid Generator (JUG):
Migrate from http://jug.safehaus.org to GitHub, this wiki, and something like google groups (why? since safehaus seems to be a ghost haus at this point)
- Major upgrade, Jug 3.0, to use latest goodies from JDK 1.4 (java.util.UUID) and 1.6 (pure Java access to Ethernet address)
"Best Of" Lists
Here are my personal, incomplete, "Best Of" lists. As a general disclaimer, lists try to contain only things I am NOT directly involved in: which means, that, some very good Java libraries may not be included (if I wrote them, or am major contributor), and some very Interesting and Inspiring individuals may be excluded from lists as well. Reason is two-fold: first, my being more biased might reduce value of the lists; and second, there is nothing like appearance of brown-nosing to add awkwardness to one's professional relationships.
So here are lists I have so far collected.
Inspiring and Interesting Individuals (I3)
List started: March 2010
(note: as mentioned above, I have excluded people I commonly interact with, as a courtesy both them and myself -- so just because you are not listed does not mean you might not be an I3)
Here is a very incomplete list of people that I found unusually Interesting and Inspiring in some context. Ordering is temporal, from most recent discoveries (of I3-ness) to less recent.
Desmond Tutu ("South African cleric and activist")
Source: Time Magazine, "10 Questions", March-2010, Annual Special Issue
- Why? Reading about someone who has won a Nobel prize should give reasonable expectations of someone unusual, in positive way. But although I have been aware (in general) of his whereabouts, there is nothing like actually listening to, or reading from person talking, answering questions. And it is surprising (to me) to find such insights condensed on so little space, and from answers to not-that-great questions. Tutu has something similar to other I3 people like Dalai Lama (and perhaps Nelson Mandela).
Tony Hsieh (Zappos.com found)
- Source: Presentation at Amazon all-hands, February-2010
Why? I have never heard as inspirational talk by anyone with CxO ranking (and seldom by anyone, period). Free-ranging, not so much focus on Zappos (that he founded, Amazon bought, and that was the background of the talk]], but on his experiences, philosophy, book he had written -- it showed how to Talk Right about positive thinking, goals, values. I can't think of how cheesy and fake positive-thinking evangelists sound like after that. If Woz is The King of Geek; Tony sure is the Boss of Biz. Yes, if you get a chance (and you probably will -- he gives talks, and you can even get a tour of Zappos in Las Vegas!), do go listen to him. He not only makes sense and is hypnotically charismatic (in very low-key way, by the way), it actually should Make You Think, if you keep your ears open.
Steve "Woz" Wozniak (Apple founder, all-around technical genius)
- Source: Presentation at Amazon internal forum ("fishbowl"), related to his then new book; at around early 2008 so
- Why? After listening to free-flowing presentation by Woz for about an hour, I realized I had witnessed someone greater than life. I am technically capable individual, but this was like a disciple listening to Jesus; or Garth and Wayne meeting Alice C. There is genial radiance; and he could have (and mostly did) talked about absolutely anything, and it would have been the greatest talk over. If you are technically inclined ("geek"), and get a chance to hear Woz talk, do so. You won't be disappointed.
- Tidbits: yes, back in the day games were programmed as hardware. And yes, Woz did... quite a few, in matter of days. And I thought writing 6502 assembly (or Vic-20 basic) was lots of work.
Dave Thomas (of Pragmatic Programmers fame -- not Wendy's founder, although he probably was also an inspirational person too)
Source: talks at No Fluff Just Stuff (NFJS), starting around late-2003 or so), Denver
Why? He is a good speaker, of course; and has practical wisdom on software engineer like few others (there actually are others, couple within NFJS circles too). He has the gift of talking about anything, and making it sound like Just What You Wanted to Hear About. I guess that is common to most I3s I list. But more importantly, he made a Big Positive Practical (BPP?) impression on me, changing my career forever. He summarized actual solid arguments FOR doing extra-curricular activity known as Open Source development (side note: yes, I do believe that Open Source works best if it augments one's for-fee work; and not so much when it is completely part of it -- but I digress). After listening to his specific talk about "how to make yourself a better professional", I went ahead and kicked off Woodstox project -- and the rest is history. I might not have started it, or at least not invested so much time on this (and other later) projects, had I not realized value it had, dividends such work-- and especially conscious decisions to do so, business-like focus -- yields.
Books That Made Me Think
(and hopefully have or will make you think, too)
List started: March 2010
- Outliers (February 2010)
- Made me realize lots of things that together conspired to give a good chance at becoming a rock start software developer (born as part of "smallest generation"; starting elementary school when Vic-20 hit the streets; starting College when WWW took over Gopher; graduating right before end of Dot.com boom)
- Predictably Irrational (December 2009)
- More scientific, deeper and nuanced view of what makes people do things that seem unexpected; sort of continuing on "the Influence book" (see below), but focusing more on fundamentally odd behavior people tend to exhibit. And understanding some aspects of this, how to improve oneself as individual; and perhaps avoid mistakes that are easy to make when interacting with others, especially when trying to influence others.
- Psychology of Persuasion ("the Influence book") (June 2007?)
- Helped point out some important yet simple aspects that can be used to influence individuals' actions, especially doing things that one might not otherwise do (in context of business, usually, as that's where money is; but applicable to selling ideas as well)
Best-in-Show: Java Libraries that Rule
[WORK IN PROGRESS -- WOEFULLY INCOMPLETE]
(note: as explained above, does not include libraries I have been building; for those, scroll further down)
Libraries here are in no particular order (for now?).
- Saxon: For XSLT, XQuery, look no further. There is nothing like it or its author in Java space that comes even close
- jDBI: For simple straight non-ORM SQL processing, this is the thing. API is a breeze to use; dependencies are minimal (zero), and "It Just Works"
- slf4j (and possibly logback): If you are writing a library that needs to do some logging, this is the wrapper to use. Good stuff comes from people who have "done it before"; and Ceci has been around the block couple of times.
Other Related Web Resources
My Blog at Cowtowncoder.com ("CowTalk")
and, related author page for bit more contact info.
My Open Source Projects
(as in, projects I have made significant contributions to)
Since I am not listing projects I am personally closely involved with on "best of" lists (as explained above); here are things omitted:
Jackson JSON processor
Woodstox XML processor
StaxMate XML helper library
Java UUID Generator (JUG) -- note: moving to GitHub from its former Safehaus home