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Back in Mac, I typed in Bash

Posted by Keith Elder | Posted in Apple | Posted on 15-02-2014

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I was trying to think of a title for this post and the first lines to “Back in Black” by AC/DC kept popping in my head. I was going to try to write a witty pun or play on words on the lyrics to “Back in Black” but I couldn’t think of a word to rhyme with *ash for the second verse. However, the lyrics are somewhat fitting.

Back in black I hit the sack

I been too long I’m glad to be back

Yes I am

Let loose from the noose

That’s kept me hanging about

I keep looking at the sky cause it’s gettin’ me high

Forget the hearse cause I’ll never die

I got nine lives cat’s eyes

Using every one of them and runnin’ wild

Cause I’m back

What am I trying to say you wonder? Well, last week I switched back to using the forbidden fruit, a half-eaten fruit if you will, Apple. The sky isn’t falling for those that only know me as a long time Windows user and Microsoft MVP because I’ve owned a Mac since 2002. I’m not going to suddenly start writing IOS apps and get all hipster so don’t worry. I’m still going to be heavily involved in the .NET community so this isn’t a “I’m leaving .NET for {insert technology} post” because the last time I checked there are still millions and millions of Windows PCs that need software. It is just that I firmly believe a Mac (being Unix based) opens the polyglot programming language door more so than running a Windows PC. Let’s face it, most of the technologies being developed aren’t being built on Windows. They are mostly being built on Mac or Linux and run very consistent on both of those platforms with just a recompile. If you’ve ever tried to run PHP, Python, Ruby, Node etc on Windows you know what I’m talking about. These technologies aren’t native and while Microsoft has made some great strides (especially with Node in Azure recently) they don’t feel or act *native* and that’s important.

2014 is about a different journey for our team. It is a journey that I have been pondering since last fall and that is how to build fault tolerant highly distributable concurrent high availability systems. While .NET, Node, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby are all great I have a burning necessity to build a highly concurrent highly available distributable system (system being the keyword). After a lot of research, thought, discussions, reading, and playing all roads led us to look at Erlang. It isn’t a flashily super hot technology like Node but it is a super powerful platform to build robust systems with as other companies like Huffington Post, WhatsApp, Facebook, Heroku, and Zynga have figured out. 

I work with some amazing team members. Their open mindset and willingness to learn new things to solve our challenging problems in new and unique ways is what really makes this shift possible. As a matter of fact the whole team got Macs this week. While our team has always considered ourselves polyglots and prided ourselves on solving the right problem with the right tool we’re ramping up our polyglotness to DefCon 1 this year. 

Where this new journey leads I don’t know but I have a vision and a plan. It could be a bust or a genius move, time will tell. We’ll figure out the how as we go and I’ll gladly share the ups and downs with those that read this blog in the coming days, weeks, months. I hope to blog about what led us to this decision over time to look at Erlang in a very serious manner but in the mean time I challenge you to get uncomfortable and crazy with us and Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good

Comments (3)

I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but my wife would STRONGLY disagree with the whole “Ruby works better on Macs” thing.

I was trying to find something geeky that ended in ash and I finally thought of a git stash. Should have kept going with it haha.

Back in Mac / I typed in Bash / Got more machine, but I got less cash

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