Peter Bromberg's UnBlog

In my short happy life as a developer, I’ve run into all kinds of development efforts that include frameworks, libraries, web sites, and much more. The one thing that stands out as an irritant to me is complexity. Specifically, unnecessary complexity. I’ve seen developers author entire library assemblies that provide wrapper utility methods consisting of calls to .NET BCL methods that take one line of code – methods that could have been called inline without even the need for the “helper” classes. I’ve seen frameworks that duplicate code that is already present in the .NET Framework, usually because the developer didn’t know they already existed (e.g., writing your own “connection pool” when the providers already expose a perfectly fine one). I’ve seen frameworks with layer upon layer of interfaces, base classes, derived classes and convoluted, multiple code paths that are inefficient and slow down execution because the developers kept building and building on top of something t...

30 years ago, Brazil imported 80% of its oil. With a strong sense of purpose, Brazil invested heavily in bio-fuel technology and refocused its transportation energy towards a resource Brazil could manufacture internally—sugar based ethanol. Today, Brazil uses flexible fuel vehicles that can run on gas, ethanol, or any combination of the two. It still has a mandate to be 100% independent of oil in 2011. Yes, Brazil still drills for oil, and they still use it - plenty of it. But at least they've had a plan for upwards of 30 years now. We have virtually none by comparison. If the President had some guts and some vision (like Kennedy did when he said we'd put a man on the moon in the next 10 years) and said "We're getting off oil by 2021", could we do it? Of course we could. It would create huge numbers of jobs, and it would deny billions in revenue to foreign producers many of whom DO NOT LIKE AMERICANS.  But, there's no vision, and no guts. And it is not lik...