Opinions

Just the facts…

A word of warning for you who stumbled upon my blog: this blog is not going to be that fun or interesting to read.

I find that the blog post I really like are the ones where the author has very strong opinions about a subject, so strong opinions in fact that he or she just can’t shut up about it. Usually the stated opinion is on the border of insanity and far from my view on the subject. These types of posts are interesting to read. They make you think. They often also make you feel something.

I am not going to write that type of blog posts. I hate opinions. I only have three:

  1. I don’t like opinions.
  2. XSLT is a terrible programming language.
  3. Redefineable syntax like operation overloading and macros is evil and the worst language feature ever.

Other than that I try to stay to just the facts. I like facts. Still, I might do two more blog posts about opinion two and three sometime. In this post I will just talk about my number one opinion: I hate opinions.

One of the thing I hate about opinions is that everyone seems to expect that you should have an opinion on every subject.

”So, what do you think about…”, and then insert any subject like ”the new Mac Book?”, ”the situation in Crimea?”, ”this blouse?”

What? Why should I have an opinion on these things?

It’s a computer, I can use it to program, thats good.

I have not lived in Crimea, I have no idea about the history between those people, but war is never the answer. 

It is red. What do you want me to say? You look good in it. But you look good in anything.

See, now I was forced to have opinions on things that I don’t care to have opinions about. And then we can start arguing. And there is no way that we can settle such an argument, because it is based on opinions and not facts.

Therefore I am always trying to just stick to the facts. We can argue about the facts, for sure, but such an argument can be settled by finding out if the facts are true or not. Facts can be proven or disproven. Opinions can not. They just are. And they are often crazy.

It is fun to read other peoples crazy opinions, but I’ll try to not have any opinions. If I do have opinions I’ll try not to tell you or write them down in my blog. I will just write facts about how Erlang works, how the Erlang runtime system works, and how programming in general works. Without opinions. It will not be that fun, but perhaps you will learn something. Something based on facts.

And please don’t force me to have opinions about things I don’t care about, or even worse force me to have opinions about thing I do care about.

I hate opinions, but hey, that’s just my opinion.

When is the Book Coming Out?

”So Erik, When is the book coming out?”

Last week I attended and spoke at Erlang Factory San Francisco.

The number one question that I got, and I got it from basically everyone I have ever met before, was ”When is the book coming out?”.

It was really nice to see that there was such an interest for the book.

The sad part is that the answer, at least in part, is: ”I don’t know”.

It is unfortunately late already. I was planning for a release in early 2014, and clearly that didn’t happen. I have only written about one third of the content. None of the chapters I have written has been edited, proofread, rewritten or even really finished. 

There is a huge amount of work left.

In the summer and fall of 2013 I again ended up as a manager at Klarna with the responsibility to get ”Kred” or ”Klarna Online”, our (well Klarna’s) OLTP system, to survive the Christmas load. The system was in a slightly unstable state at the beginning, but the Kred Core team managed to get it stable, responsive and really performing well straight through the Christmas rush. Unfortunately this took all of my time and energy, and the book writing got put on hold.

Fortunately, this led me to finally take the step and resign

The plan now is to take a week of vacation here in California, and then I will work full time on the book. If all goes well I should be able to finish most of the writing by early summer. Then perhaps I can get reviewer comments by the end of the summer and have a ”final” version ready by September or so.

From now on I will also try to keep you posted on the progress here on the blog.

I'm writing a book, I got the page numbers done.

Moving On

Yes, I quit my job.

Since so many of the people I meet keep on asking me I thought I’d best make it official.

After working at Klarna for more than eight years I decided to try something new. So I resigned and started my own company HappiHacking. Tomorrow, Sunday March 9th, is formally my last day of employment.

Right now I am taking a vacation in California, and after that I will start working on the Erlang runtime system book.

And, no, I do not really know what I will do after that.

I am on my own now, and I can do what I want. This is both exciting and very scary at the same time.

 

Sorry, this post was neither funny nor very informative, it was just a public announcement I’ll try to do better next time.

 

Hh