An Architect's View

Heard of CLEAR - Fly Through Airport Security? If you travel a lot, you might want to check it out. My wife and I signed up this year because we're flying a lot (four CF conferences for me and countless cat shows for her). It's $100 per person per year (with an initial $28 setup fee) but, oh boy, is it worth it! Our first experience was flying back from Denver recently (Oakland hadn't quite got the system up and running for our outbound trip). You know how security lines are at the airport? Imagine this: Walk up to the CLEAR lane and present your microchipped CLEAR card. A quick biometric identification (retina scan or fingerprint scan) and then you are escorted to the head of the line, ahead of everyone else, with airport staff carrying all of your belongings that need to be scanned. They cut you in right at the metal detector and watch over all your things as they are x-rayed. Then you're on your way. You can pretty much guarantee less than five minutes in security, regardless of how long the lines are! It's even true of international security. Jay went off to Hungary this week (to judge a cat show in Bekescsaba) and was able to completely bypass the lines at security. If you're traveling a lot and want to sign up for this, contact me and I'll send you a referral code that will give you one month free (and I'll get a month free too!).

A pet peeve of mine. This time the culprit is Gensys Infotech based in Fremont, CA. I received an email from a "Vivek Bhaskar" the other day to my almost brand new Broadchoice email address, offering their services along with pricing. I replied, asking how they obtained my email address since it was so new. Vivek responded that they buy lists from a third party. I told them to remove me from their mailing lists and not to contact me again. Today, I get the exact same email introducing their "services" and requesting a phone call. I reported the email as spam and added them to my SpamCop blacklist. Grrr!

Dopplr is out of beta and open for everyone to sign up now. It's a good way to see who is going to be at conferences (or cat shows!) that you are attending. Sign up and start sharing your trips with colleagues and friends.

For immediate release

On-Demand Services Attract In-Demand Architect

CASTRO VALLEY, Calif. -- Feb. 16, 2008 -- Sean Corfield today announced that he will be joining Broadchoice, Inc. headquartered in San Mateo, California as their Chief Systems Architect and Vice President of Engineering. In this new position, Corfield will oversee the evolution of Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ platform, expanding the capabilities and scaling the on-demand service to meet the ever-increasing customer base. Corfield said "Broadchoice has a really gifted team that has already created a winning service, used by companies such as Cisco. I'm excited to be part of that team and to have the opportunity to really take the platform to a new level." Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ is created and powered by Adobe technologies.

Richard Bennion, Broadchoice Founder & CTO, is a long-time advocate of ColdFusion and has been a pioneer in digital marketing for twenty years. "Bennion's energy and enthusiasm was key in attracting me to this role," said Corfield, "and he and I share an enthusiasm for great experiences created by great technology."

Also joining the Broadchoice team is Luke Kilpatrick, co-manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) and manager of Fire on the Bay, an Adobe Fireworks User Group serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Kilpatrick brings a wealth of experience in UI development and content management systems to the Broadchoice team. Corfield said "Kilpatrick's a friend of mine and I'm looking forward to having him on my team."

About Sean Corfield
Sean Corfield has been a freelance consultant since leaving the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems, Inc. in April 2007 and was formerly the Senior Architect for the IT division of Macromedia, Inc. for almost six years. Prior to joining Macromedia, Corfield drove the architecture of a number of high-traffic, high-profile websites for a diverse group of companies after working on the ANSI J16 C++ Standards Committee for eight years and building compilers, interpreters and runtime systems. He is also manager of BACFUG and a frequent speaker at ColdFusion conferences around the world, as well as a contributor to a number of open source ColdFusion projects.

About Broadchoice, Inc.
Broadchoice is the leader in providing on-demand marketing solutions for the enterprise. The Digital Marketing Manager™ platform provides a fully integrated, enterprise application for web content management, enterprise marketing management and channel partner management.

For those who aren't sure, this is intended to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek announcement but the news is real. I start the new job on Monday, February 18th, and I'm looking forward to hiring some of the best talent to help me grow a very exciting product! Stay tuned!

A few years ago, Jay and I went to a friend's wedding in Montana and had a fabulous time at the spa and at our friends' ranch. Last year, we went back to help on the new house our friends were building on their new ranch in Montana. Part of what they had in mind was offering unique, private vacations on their ranch with an eco-friendly, back-to-nature approach. We had such a wonderful time there that I thought I'd blog a quick mention of their Bison Quest Sanctuary and Spa package in case it appeals to any of my readers as a way to really unwind and take a break from our hectic, high-tech world!

Please do not send personal email to my Gmail account! I use it exclusively for mailing lists. I sometimes go days without checking it and I get so much email there that I often just mark swathes of it as "read" without actually reading it. If you want me to see something and actually respond to it, send it to my corfield.org account (or use the contact form on my blog).

Some people were not very excited about Apple's keynote yesterday but the 1.1.3 firmware update for the iPhone is plenty enough for me, along with Google's updated mobile apps. I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps? Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement! So now my iPhone has:

• 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock - with 10 cities
• Maps
• Notes
• Stocks
• Weather

Followed by:

• Google Docs
• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Belfry Scientific Calculator
• My client's Google Docs
• My client's Google Mail
• ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
• IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!

Then my menu bar is:

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

On screen two, I have a row of games:

• Bejeweled
• Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
• InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
• Mahjong

Then my multimedia tools:

• Camera
• iTunes
• iPod
• Photos
• Text
• YouTube

And, yes, they are in alphabetical groups. Call me anal retentive and see if I care! Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!

An interesting blog post aimed at helping non-programmers recognize the indicators common in good programmers. The comments are long (over 180 as of this writing!) but mostly in agreement although there are some interesting dissenters as well. He talks through six major issues and then summarizes in positive and negative bullet points. It's not a perfect list but I agree with most of it. When I'm hiring, I look for someone who is passionate, programs in their spare time, works on personal side-projects, learns additional technologies "for fun". I want someone who has "strong opinions, weakly held" (which is a toned down version of what is presented on that blog post). Similarly, I hear alarm bells when I am interviewing a developer who views programming as "just a job", only learns new technologies when the company sends them on training courses and only knows one set of technologies. I'm less concerned (than the blog's author) about someone who started programming "late" in life. As folks who've been interviewed by me know, I don't "quiz" people or set them "clever" tests. I get them talking about their work and their projects. I want to hear passion, I want to hear about problems and how they solved them - and how they dealt with managers (or peers) who didn't see eye to eye with them on solutions. Are your criteria different?

I'm working with just three clients right now and with each of them I am essentially doing the same thing: taking an existing system that has been built up over a number of years and helping them rearchitect it for better maintainability and better scalability. The technology stack is pretty similar in all three cases:

• Model-Glue (two clients), Mach-II (other client)
• ColdSpring
• Transfer

In addition, we're using cfcUnit and ColdMock for unit testing (Brian Kotek's ColdMock project is awesome for unit testing beans that are actually Transfer decorators!). All three clients are on - or imminently moving to - ColdFusion 8 (as most of my clients have been) so we can take advantage of AJAX, performance, array/struct syntax, enhanced operator syntax, onMissingMethod() - which powers ColdMock - and many other recent enhancements. These three clients have been keeping me pretty busy - I was even on-site with one of them for three days this week which, as folks who know me will realize, is pretty unusual since I've mostly kept to remote work since I left Adobe. I think they're going to be keeping me busy for at least the first quarter of 2008. I haven't been blogging much this past two weeks but I've been posting to a few mailing lists, covering decorators (Transfer), dependencies (ColdSpring) and various OO design issues. I've also been writing an article for FAQU which will be in issue 6 (issue 5 is at the printers and should be in readers' hands soon). The article covers the whole "beans + DAO + gateway + service" object stuff, looking at four possible ways to structure your code and examining the pros and cons of each. I'm also reviewing a new ColdFusion book that is in the works. It's a great introductory book that covers a lot of best practices and focuses on CFCs up front. It's target market means that it probably won't get on most American developers' radars but I think it will be worth tracking down and reading if you're a novice (to ColdFusion). I'll also be writing a regular column for [name withheld] on my favorite subject: architecture. As you can tell, 2008 has started off busy and looks likely to stay that way. I think the year will offer me some interesting challenges and some interesting opportunities - and maybe some big changes too.

You've always wanted to know what I really do at weekends? Here's a great little interview on Geek Entertainment TV that was filmed at a local cat show... My wife is one of the judges shown in the opening sequence and, yes, I know everyone they interview and most of the cats they feature as well :)