Interview: David Angry of Twittch

I was lucky enough to score an exclusive interview about Strange Loop with David Angry, a lead character in the Twittch comic drawn by Eric Burke.

Alex: Hi David, I'm glad you could find some time in your busy day to answer some questions about the Strange Loop conference. Are you excited to have a new developer conference close to home?

David: Some people say this is like bringing a bit of San Francisco to St. Louis, only without the Cable Cars and Liberals. With West Coast conferences, I can miss work a few more days for travel -- your conference isn't much of a boondoggle. A local conference makes it harder to explain my whereabouts on Wednesday. I suppose it's good to be home for the Saturday after the conference, so it's probably more positive than negative.

Alex: You've threatened to speak at Strange Loop even though you didn't submit a talk and weren't invited. If you did manage to break through our security, what would you speak about?

David: I snuck in to Google I/O, so I'm not sure why you think your little get together will be hard to infiltrate. I am very thin. My presentation is titled "Beg Forgiveness -- Don't Ask Permission", and it's about techniques for sneaking subversive technologies into corporate IT. Let's face it. If I asked Stanley (our new Chief Architect) for permission to use Scala instead of JDK 1.4, he'd make me share a cube with a contractor for a month and give half my RAM to the new intern. On the other hand, by sneaking in these technologies, it's damn near impossible to take them away. We don't all work at start ups, and innovation needs to happen from the bottom up. Waiting for management to choose next year's technology works really well...for vendors with fancy sales pitches.

I hope to pick up a lot more ideas for "sneaky technologies" at Strange Loop.

Alex: I sometimes get the impression from your Twitter stream that you find most if not all software to be frustrating, buggy, and largely a pain in the ass. Is this due to simple programmer incompetence or is there a deeper problem with the inherent complexity of writing production-quality software?

David: Yes.

Alex: Would better programmer tools and languages help? Or will programmers manage to screw it up regardless?

David: Our apps are huge and only get bigger over time. Since Merda Tech probably won't hire programmers who know how to design modular software, we definitely need IDEs that can scale up to huge projects without locking up to "synchronize" every few minutes. I'm skeptical about new languages, although they may provide job security if I'm the only one who knows how to maintain an app. And then I ask myself...do I really want job security?

Seriously, I like static typing, but I don't like all the typing I have to do in Java. Writing a POJO with PropertyChangeSupport, getters, setters, equals(), hashCode(), etc...that gives me a shooting pain in my left arm just thinking about it. The Ruby Mutants talk with Charles Oliver Nutter looks cool, I really want to hear what he says about Duby, a statically-typed variant of Ruby.

Bob Lee's keynote should be cool mostly because I want to see his Java-based slide show app. And can Griffon really make Swing fun?

The MongoDB talk sounds fantastic! Maybe a non-relational DB provides an escape hatch for me to create schemas that work better with my code, without involving the DBAs.

I'm rambling, but it beats fixing Carl's bugs. To answer the second part of your question, yes.

Alex: What are the chances Merda Tech will send you to Strange Loop? It's only $75 till August 14th, surely they'd be willing to pay such a small conference fee for a valuable employee like yourself.

David: As far as my boss is concerned, I'll be "working from home" those days. And no, I'm not paying your ridiculous $75 fee!

Alex: What's your beef with Carl, anyways? Sure, he's a hapless rube, but isn't he trying to find his way in this crazy mixed-up world just like everybody else?

David: Oh crap, the build's broken...I gotta go. CARL!!!!!