Stephan Schmidt
Who is Stephan Schmidt?
I’m head of development at brands4friends, a shopping club or flash ecommerce site. We sell mainly clothes for reduced prices and a limited time, like a summer sale every day. Beside that I’m a programmer, blogger and speaker at conferences.
Your favorite language?
68000 assembler hands down. I never again knew a language that good, knowing the byte size and execution cycles of nearly all opcodes. Everything was possible, self modifying code, optimizing for CPU cycles, optimizing for bytes. Without an operating system there were no limits, just you, the CPU and the graphics chip.
Scala vs Clojure vs Ruby?
Today Scala. There are some things I do not like about it, and I feel pain because it does not live to its potential, but it’s the best currently available. Object oriented, but easy to write functional code, one of the very few new statically typed languages with momentum. Dense and powerful. Butreally are different mind sets for languages. Ruby is very “word-oriented”, there are very few symbols. Scala on the contrary is more in line with languages like K, with a culture that doesn’t like words but symbols. Sometimes that makes reading Scala source code a challenge. But the power it brings alleviates the pain.
Why not Clojure? I’ve been doing Lisp before university and at university. I love the power of Lisp, and the real beauty of the homogenous structure. So I play with Clojure and get inspired. Rich Hickey has done a tremendous job, releasing new features, innovating, integrating with Java. Not sure it will reach a larger audience though.
I did some Ruby in the nineties (and a lot of Python before that), I even wrote an integrated, convention based web framework with an ORM, a little before Rails was released. I like the way Ruby code looks, it has some beauty to it. But I’m not sure it scales with time and developers and I’ve learned I tend to like statically typed languages more. Call me insecure.
What does your typical day look like?
Usually getting up at 6am, reading and writing a blog post on CodeMonkeyism if I have an idea. Going to work, reading and answering mails and checking Hacker News. I’m a ScrumMaster at brands4friends so – although the team is really great – I sometimes need to encourage people to live the spirit of Scrum. I’m also kind of the lead architect, so for strategy and some of the heavier nuts developers come and ask, and we discuss architectural issues to find a scaling and satisfying solution. I encourage the developers to find their own solutions though. There are some meetings sprinkled in, and as we are a startup I really do a lot of recruiting.
What do you do in your free time?
Programming stuff, as I love programming. This includes playing with new frameworks, currently the Playframework and evaluating NoSQL storages. Together with a friend I founded a Rotary club which also takes some time. If there is time left I enjoy playing games, mostly shooters because the time you put into them is limited. If I have ideas I’m writing about them on my blog.
Current favorite apps?
DropBox. I know I’m late to the show, but running the Playframework in DropBox on several computers made things easier and fun. And all the games from Puppy games, especially the new Revenge of the Titans, which is in beta and fun because the developers change major portions of play dynamics every beta release incorporating player feedback. Never saw someone do it this extensive before.
What OS do you prefer?
MacOS X. There were two unused Mac Cubes at one of my former employers ten years ago and after putting one on my desk I really felt in love. Beautiful, innovative desktop applications with the power of Unix if needed.
Small picture for your Workplace?
Name something that has inspired you recently?
Clojure and STM, thinking about where different concurrency paradigms are best applied, like STM, message passing, dataflow, low level locking. Functional programming inspired me too – again – and – a cliche – monads. More recently the book “To Mock a Mockingbird” got me thinking and the usage of Kestrels and Thrushes in Scala, thanks to
Debasish Ghosh for both.
On a non related topic, “The Decline of Middle America and the Problem of Meritocracy” has changed my thinking a lot. When you live by meritocracy you see it as a given moving to larger cities to work with interesting people and have an interesting live. The article writes about what this does to small towns in the US which have a massive brain drain going on for years and calls for a stop to meritocracy. I never saw it that way, but as I come from a small town I could relate and it changed my thinking.
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
I prefer full time work. I was a consultant for some time and never felt being part of the company I’ve worked for. I missed being part of something.
What are your personnel projects and goals for 2010?
For a long time I wanted to write an ebook on how to apply for a development job, I see so many people doing it wrong. I hope I can finish this 2010.
