A New Home, A New Mindset

I finally moved my extremely interesting and groundbreaking blog to claudioperrone.com.

I thought about doing it for a long time, but I haven’t really bothered until now.

The geek in me, however, has finally taken full control of my destiny andHouse Plan now I can finally tweak everything I want: permalinks, themes, text filters, and, even more importantly, spam filters!

Since I’m moving away from a service based on .Text, what do you think a traditionally hardcore Microsoft technologist like me would install? Community Server? DasBlog? Perhaps Subtext? Build my own engine?
Nahhh… boring, boring, boring… been there, done that.

In the end, I decided to install Typo 4, a little jewel based on Ruby on Rails.
I can almost hear you guys: Blasphemy…This is not .NET! Betrayer etc, etc (well I know, others may ask Ruby on what???, but never mind).

No, I’m not out of my mind.
I still love .NET, and I passionately work for an outstanding company whose purpose is to reveal more efficient ways to help developers building enterprise applications using .NET technologies.

The truth is that it is time for me to give Ruby another chance.
Yes, you heard me. I said another chance. In fact, I tried it in the past, with modest results.

The problem was me, not the language, of course.
I kept questioning everything.
Can you imagine it?
Why this, why that?
How can that code be manageable in a reasonably big application?

I remember going through the Pickaxe book with extreme frustration.
I lost the battle; Ruby was too different; I didn’t “get it”.

But do you know how children learn their (first) language so fast?

  • They don’t have anything to compare it with
  • They don’t question its value
  • They don’t set high expectations
  • They just absorb everything, like only the best sponges can do

So there you go; I want to be a child again.

Arguably I have being exposed to these concepts for too long. Some colleagues already played with Ruby, and, largely thanks to the early adoption of Michael O’Brien, both strategic applications and tactical scripts have been already built for internal use.

And like a disease, the doubt that I might have been a bit too superficial in my early judgement is spreading all over my body.

At the workshop in Crested Butte, Niclas Nilsson, Martin Fowler and Bruce Eckel giggled when I naïvely told them that I have a “static” mindset.
Puzzled by my (admittedly poor) choice of the word “static” in that context, Bruce smiled and asked me if I meant that I live in a static world where nothing ever changes!
Eh eh, we had a good laugh.
Of course, I only meant that I’ve been pretty comfortable with the perceived sense of security that “strongly typed” languages give me.
But now I’m ready to go back and revisit my assumptions.

So, what’s next?

If there is one thing that I’m learning about blogging is that I should never set expectations about future posts unless I am positively confident that I will definitely fulfill those expectations.
My writing energy fades away too easily.

So don’t expect anything.
Be a child.

Claudio Perrone

My passion is to develop the critical thinking skills of people and help them bring the best of their work to the world. Lean & Agile management consultant, startup strategist, award-winning speaker and entrepreneur. Creative force behind A3 Thinker and PopcornFlow.

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. Pawel Pabich

    Congratulations! Good move. I’m going to the same as soon as I find decent hosting company.

  2. Claudio Perrone

    Thanks Pawel. This blog is actually hosted by Site5, but if you need a .NET hosting provider, I personally recommend DiscountASP.NET. I still have an account with them. They are relatively cheap, and their service is absolutely excellent.

  3. Brian Finnerty

    Congrats on the new blog, it’s great. Keep us posted on how the move to Ruby on Rails and Typo 4 works out. I hope you keep the enery up for writing posts if you can – as Jack London said, “you can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club”. Heh, heh…

  4. Paul Gielens

    What a coincidence, I’ve also created a new endpoint paulgielens.com to my blog. Any particular reason why you used “transformation” in the sub title?

  5. Claudio Perrone

    Hi Paul! I’m not sure why I chose the term “transformation”. Perhaps it is because I try to learn something new every single day, often by trying different things or by reading a new book; more often it’s by trying to deeply understand what someone is trying to say. And what I read, hear or feel influences and transforms me, sometimes deeply enough to make me more vulnerable, I’m afraid. By the way… I really need to catch up with your lastest articles…they look absolutely excellent!

  6. Dinh Doan Van Bien

    Hi Claudio! Congrats on your new spot – I am hosted by Site5 too and I can’t complain! Ruby eh? Argh, I so miss Smalltalk! About the transformation thingy, our first discussion sure helped me refocus a lot of things, thanks again. And your continuous learning motto should be the motto of every “honnête programmeur” of the 21st century. Cheers.

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