Timothy Perrett
Who is Timothy Perrett?
I am a technical specialist at a division of Xerox corporation during the day, and a Lift and Akka committer during my spare time. More recently, I became an author and started writing a book on Lift called “Lift in Action” to be released later in 2010. I spend most of my time writing systems integration middleware and designing systems for our corporate customers.
Ruby or Scala? and why?
Ruby will always be my programming pocket knife, but Scala is my weapon of choice for production work. Not wanting to beat on Ruby, because it has some great pros, rather, Scala just works much better for the type of cross-platform work I usually do. If I just need to bash out a quick script to do something, or automate some task im working on, then sure, I’ll use Ruby. However, if I need to build a full web-application with lots of complex components Scala (and Lift) wins. easily. Its just a much nicer way of working and allows me a lot of flexibility and security that I didnt find with Ruby – for instance, inferred types at compile time keeps the code neat / light but still totally type-safe.
About Lift?
Lift is awesome, firstly from technical perspective, and secondly for its great community. The community was what actually persuaded me to stick around and learn Lift properly – its full of awesome smart people and no question is ever too dumb. We really like to foster newbies and respond to their questions in an effort to make their getting started and translation of understanding to be as pain-free as possible. Lift is without doubt the best web-framework I’ve ever used – it has a super great feature set and really lets users focus on their problem domain, not on framework level plumbing.
What does your typical day look like?
My working days usually involve getting up first thing, checking my emails then touching base with my team and then getting down to my tasks. In any given day it could either be going to see customers or straight development. My life is fortunately pretty varied.
What do you do in your free time?
Im massively into skiing during the winter months, so that has just finished occupying what little time I have when not writing the book or doing my day job. Now we are moving into summer I’ll be kayaking again soon as I live right by the river. I guess if im not doing either of those things then im usually hanging out in the garden having a beer with friends.
Current favorite apps?
Probably SBT (simple build tool). I’ve written some plugins for it and use it all the time now for my dev work and its just such a slick build tool… it blows away Maven and Any with ease.
What OS do you prefer?
Mac OSX all the way – no other operating system comes close! I also really like BSD and Ubuntu for deployment.
Small picture for your Workplace?
Favorite: Language, JS Framework?
Right now its gotta be cappuccino – the guys at 280 North are doing some amazing work with porting Cocoa to the browser and I think 2010 will be a big year for them. Its great for developers as you don’t have to worry about CSS and so forth, its just a clean, code-orientated approach.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
The Lift team. Working with awesome minds is very inspiring and i’ve learn so much from guys like David, Marius and Jonas.
What are your personnel projects and goals for 2010?
Of course im working on Lift in Action, so im aiming to have that in stores for around November – right now that is probably the biggest goal I have. I’m also really looking forward to Scala Days at EPFL this April… it will be the biggest meeting on Lift committers ever so thats going to be really awesome. I’m also looking forward to Devoxx this year and hoping to speak there again.
