Any time I need to answer a question about REST, I end up spending 2-3 hours reading. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing… anyway, while doing some of that reading I was on InfoQ at this post, and that lead to this post, and that lead to this post, and at the end of the post the guy said:
So run away screaming from anyone who dismisses these as “just implementation details” – implementation details matter. They cost money, and break hearts.
And it’s an excellent quote. I’ve still got this page, which looks like its mime-type is wrong, and this wikipedia page, because it looks interesting, and this website, because it’s what inspired Sam Ruby to get off his SOAPbox to take a little REST (haha I’m so clever) and this article because it seriously sounds like an insanely useful read. I might save it for another day. This is a good time to just toss this in here, which should have been included yesterday, but wasn’t. It’s about the javascript event model, which prior to reading that article, I had never really considered the existence of, and it’s made so much magic plain in my mind. quirksmode and infoQ are really excellent websites, by the way.
Echoing yesterday’s words, every time I look into the internet, it grows deeper. I can’t help but wonder about whether there’s something worthy hidden in rpc-style communication, but I’ve heard the horror stories, and I know that no technology is a panacea, even if working with JSON tends to feel an order of magnitude less painful than working with XML, and all the big SOAP things I’ve worked with were XML-based.
Also, I completed day 21 of blogging, yesterday. My last two posts kind of sucked. Well, no, they really sucked. They’re just me rambling! I need to have a focus and a plan in the future, or at least a bunch of exposition and links like I’ve got here.
What’s next
My plan for the next 21 days is ambitious, and maybe a little reckless. I’m going to be speed reading. Here’s how it breaks down, with each phase lasting a full week:
Phase 1: Read at least 10 pages of at least 2 books, every day.
Phase 2: Read at least 20 pages of at least 3 books, every day.
Phase 3: Read at least 30 pages of at least 4 books, every day.
I’m going to review this plan as I go forward, because I have absolutely no idea how realistic it is. It ends with me reading 120 pages a day, which at the moment feels totally outside of my ability to fit into my life. It starts with reading 20 pages a day, which feels doable, but like it’ll take effort. If I’m going to reach a point where I’m burning through 120 pages of material a day, then I think I’ll have to be speed reading. I’ll definitely need to break 200 words per minute — let’s make some estimates:
A book has on average 50 lines per page (I know, most have 40, but I’m going to be reading the Feynman Lectures on Physics as part of this, which have ~60 lines of text per page), and has, on average, about 14 words per line (again I’m pulling this up from 12ish because the Feynman book averages about 16). So we’ve got 50 * 14 = 700 words per page. 20*700 = 14000 words, and at 200 wpm that means 70 minutes of reading. To start. On the high end, 120 pages, we’ve got 6 times as much, which means 420 minutes of reading. That’s insane.
If I can get up to 500 wpm, I can cut 70 minutes down to 28 minutes, and 420 down to 168. I think I can manage to read for 3 hours in a day, but seven is impossible for me. If I can get up to 800 words per minute (my dream goal), then I could read 120 pages in just 105 minutes. Just under 2 hours of solid reading every day. Scary, but I’d love to accomplish it.
Today, I’ll just read my normal speed on whatever books I have around two of (The Illiad, Red Mars, Feynman, and Walden). Starting tomorrow I’ll grab a book that I’ve read previously so that I can focus on speed without worrying about my loss of comprehension. My other book will be Stand on Zanzibar, which has a “stream of content” delivery, and may be best consumed at a lightning-fast pace with slight misunderstanding. Blog posts for the next 21 days will be responses to or summaries of the content I’ve read; they may be done with a day’s lag. Not sure yet! And as usual, I’ll occasionally leave updates with regards to the process.