Al Wenger Wants To Learn Scala

And so should you.

I came across this post by Al on Tumblr - my idea of TV - not long back and was the first person to reblog it there. Yes!

It is an honest, relatable, inspiring post. And I said so in a comment.

To those of you who might not know - I do have a global audience - Al Wenger is a top notch VC in New York City.

I promptly created a Scala page. This is still early. I first blogged about Scala back in May, and Google still shows only a handful of websites dedicated to Scala. Wow.

Al, I am with you now.



Wait, did I just say a line from The Godfather?

I could hardly call Al a friend, we have met in person but once. And I am strict about using the family metaphor. Some weirdos in Kentucky spoiled it for me.

Al to me is a VC and a blogger, and that is good enough for me.

One small but not unimportant fact I learned about Al during my one meeting with him is that he is Mayor of some horse place upstate.

How My Grandfather Became Mayor The First Time

Scala - Wikipedia: Scala stands for "scalable language", signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users..... Scala code can call Java libraries (or .NET libraries in the .NET implementation). ..... Scala's operational characteristics are the same as Java's. .... Scala is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. .... In April 2009 Twitter announced they had switched large portions of their backend from Ruby to Scala and intended to convert the rest. In addition Foursquare uses Scala and Lift

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Facebook's Location Patent

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

CNet: Facebook granted geolocation patent: Among the concepts it claims are the sending and receiving of location-based status messages (what are commonly known as "check-ins"), the technology to store these check-ins, the ability to sense a street address to store in a check-in, and the receiving of a friend's check-in.

What just happened? Is this troubling? Some experts are going to have to weigh in on this one. What's going on? Facebook was rather late to the location game and now it has the patent on the whole thing? How does that work?

I am opposed to the idea of anyone getting a patent on the inbox. I mean, I am opposed to the idea of even FourSquare getting a patent on the check in. What the.

What just happened?

The weirdest part of this story is going to be that (literally) the Einsteins at the patent office had never heard of FourSquare and had never checked in anywhere themselves. I will bet you roadside falafel that is the case.

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$1 Trillion In Savings

Image via Wikipedia

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: save $1 trillion over the next decade.

When I read this headline I thought someone came up with an app that will help people lose weight, because if America could somehow go to its 1980 obesity levels - which was bad enough - America would save $1 trillion in health care costs. But no, these tech CEOs have something else on mind.

This headline also made me think that although Obama 08 did a great job of grassroots campaigning, it pretty much wrote the book on it, we are not there yet when it comes to grassroots governing where everybody is involved. Just like Dean 2004 was not there yet when it came to grassroots campaigning, Obama 08 is not there yet when it comes to grassroots governing.

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: First off, the organization believes the federal government should consolidate its many data centers to reduce IT overhead.

No kidding.

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: Secondly, the organization contends that the U.S. government should "streamline" its supply chain and make goods-and-service procurement more standardized.

Talk about business sense.

CNet: Tech CEOs find $1 trillion in government savings: $200 billion could be saved over the next 10 years by analyzing payments being disbursed through Medicare, federal grants, and tax refunds. ..... the government should rely on "electronic self-service" to save $50 billion; sell or auction off many of the "14,000 excess, and 55,000 underutilized buildings in the federal inventory" for a $150 billion savings; cut down on energy use to save $20 billion; and migrate to more shared services for another $50 billion in savings.

The best part of these suggestions might not be that they are totally doable, and they will save a ton of money, but that in implementing them the US federal government will become more transparent, more agile, in short a better government. I say let's go do it.

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