Call The Doctor

So, here's the post I probably should have started out with.

The one that might have prevented painful head scratching when reading my actual initial post.

The one with the whos and the whys.

So here we go.

Nigh-on 4 years ago now, I was on a software development project in Austin, Texas with Brian Drake and James Rehfeld (both of whom are, needless to say, almost as talented and handsome as myself). Over the course of our time in Texas, eating lunch became a major focus of our day. This is what happens when you work on a project away from home. Anyhow, trying to figure out where to go to lunch always seemed to consume (no pun intended) far too much of our allotted lunch break.

These were, those of you who were around will remember, heady days. You could buy your pet food on the web, and the people who provided you with that service were rolling around naked in giant piles of money. Surely, I though, the web, which had solved so many of our other social ills, would solve this one. Unfortunately, a few hours on google suggested I was wrong.

Now there wasn't much on TV, and, remember, I'm 1500 miles away from home here, so I sat down and wrote a little web app for a larf. You can read more about it all here. Anyway, I ran it internally for a bit, but it was my officemate, Brian Drake (henceforth to be referred to only as "Drake", because I constantly misspell "Brian"), who kept that from being the proverbial end of that. He started a contest to rename the site when we found a squatter on the initial "whatsforlunch.com," he registered the eventual winner ("drlunch.com"), he paid for the first few years of hosting, and he's been hosting it himself since then.

A shocking number of people found the site, and I discovered just how many bugs appear when you have thousands of people hitting a site you wrote for a larf. I did my best to clean things up, but then Dr. Lunch just sat there, chugging along untouched, up until a few months ago.

When...

James was studying up on hibernate and looking for a testcase to play with. I'd been meaning to move Dr. Lunch over to hibernate for ages, but had never gotten around to it, so I suggested he give it a go. Meanwhile, like every other geek in the world, I was getting excited about Ruby on Rails and AJAX and from thence arose my grand plan: create two versions of Dr. Lunch, one running on the trendiest Java stack available and one running on Rails. The user, in this vision, would be able to toggle between the two versions and end up with a seemless lunchtime experience. Developers everywhere would be fascinated. We would be able to record our experiences during the effort in this here blog, which might (just maybe) be of some interest to someone thinking about Java or Rails or the intersection of/transition between the two.

Of course we may talk about a few other things as well -- I know Drake's been dying to have a forum to talk about his feelings on the true meaning of Arbor Day, and I've got a list a mile long of things I can be snarky about -- but basically it should be about software, about what goes into making it work and about whether or not massive overhyped technologies can live up to their hype.

Phew, that was a slog to read through, huh? It certainly was to write. Things will be breezier in the future, honest.