chromatic

Biography

chromatic promotes free and open source software for O'Reilly's Open Technology Exchange. In practice, this means editing and researching.

He is the author of Extreme Programming Pocket Guide, a co-author of Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook, the lead author of Perl Hacks, and a co-author of The Art of Agile Development.

chromatic has contributed to several projects including Perl 5, Perl 6, Pugs, and, these days, Parrot. Someday, he'd like to claim some responsibility for improving the quality of all software.

He lives just west of Portland, Oregon with two cats, a creek in his backyard, and a park one house over. It's too late for him to choose a more realistic-sounding pen name.

Books

Perl Hacks by chromatic , Damian Conway, Curtis Poe May 2006 $29.99 USD (Read Reviews)	Perl Testing: A Developer's Notebook by Ian Langworth, chromatic July 2005 $29.95 USD
Extreme Programming Pocket Guide by chromatic July 2003 $9.95 USD (Read Reviews)	Running Weblogs with Slash by chromatic , Brian Aker, David Krieger January 2002 $34.95 USD

Articles

You need to enable JavaScript to view more than 15 articles by this author. Does Enterprise Development Have to Be Painful? (Part Two)
Publish Date: May. 7, 2008After several years away from anything resembling enterprise software, chromatic accepted a challenge from SAP Labs to try their new software development platform. What lessons have they learned from dynamic languages and frameworks? Has developing big serious software truly become more agile? In this second of three articles, chromatic uses SAP NetWeaver Composition Environment to build a bare-bones application from the data model to the UI. Does Enterprise Development Have to Be Painful?
Publish Date: Feb. 28, 2008After several years away from anything resembling enterprise software, chromatic accepted a challenge from SAP Labs to try their new software development platform. What lessons have they learned from dynamic languages and frameworks? Has developing big serious software truly become more agile? In this first of three articles, chromatic explores the ecosystem around SAP NetWeaver CE and tackles the first challenge -- installation. Switching Back to Desktop Linux
Publish Date: Jun. 1, 2006Almost everyone at O'Reilly owns an iBook or PowerBook and almost everyone runs Mac OS X. It's not everyone's ideal operating system, however. Recently, free software editor chromatic explained to Mac editor Derrick Story why he switched back to desktop Linux. Here's what he wants in a usable Unix desktop. ONLamp 2005 Survey Results
Publish Date: Dec. 2, 2005We recently ran a survey on ONLamp.com to find out more about our readers. Here are some of the interesting tidbits of information we learned. Tell Us What You Think: The ONLamp Survey
Publish Date: Oct. 11, 2005We're asking ONLamp readers to participate in our annual online survey. We've sweetened the pot with a chance to win books and MAKE magazine subscriptions. Here's how it works. Smartphones
Publish Date: Jul. 8, 2005Just when you think you've made sense of all of the new phones, calling plans, and options, along comes a new batch of hardware. If you're slogging along with old technology and expired calling plans, you're in the same boat as a few of the O'Reilly folks on the Editors List. Here's a recent conversation about smartphones. Password Management
Publish Date: May. 20, 2005A recent thread on the Editors List started with surprise that our work made it to the New York Times attached to a juicy bit of celebrity gossip; then, as usual, it morphed into a discussion of practical uses of technology. Here's an idea for making your personal secrets more secret and less personal. Error Checking
Publish Date: Mar. 14, 2005Should error checking be included in printed books that cover code? Is it worth adding an extra 10% of text in order to ensure that programmers will not forget to check for error conditions? And ultimately, who's responsibility is it to check for errors? These questions bear a multitude of implications. In a recent discussion on the Editor's List, four editors contemplated the pros and cons of including error checking in print texts. Dear Scott/Dear Max
Publish Date: Dec. 17, 2004If there's one constant in the publishing world, it's the give-and-take relationship between editors and authors. A recent thread on the Editors List discussed this relationship among famous authors and editors as captured in their own words. The State of Java
Publish Date: Oct. 19, 2004Is the Java revolution over? Has the big business-friendly approach turned Java into the new COBOL? Is the momentum behind .NET and Mono stealing away the cool factor that Java once enjoyed? Are those even bad things? In a recent discussion on the Editors List, several editors--programmers themselves--debated these questions. Linux and Patent Risks
Publish Date: Aug. 6, 2004OSRM recently commissioned a study that found the Linux kernel potentially infringes on 283 patents. Though some people find cause for alarm, others see this knowledge as a good thing. Here's more information on the study and its findings. OSCON 2004: The SCO Moot Court
Publish Date: Jul. 28, 2004SCO's lawsuits over Linux copyrights and Unix contracts are still ongoing. Monday night featured a mock court, where lawyers presented the arguments of SCO and IBM to the attendees. Here's a rundown. The Pragmatic Programmers Interview
Publish Date: Jun. 24, 2004The Pragmatic Programmers, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, recently launched their own line of books on pragmatic software development. Since O'Reilly helps to distribute their books, we convinced them to do an interview about self-publishing, the state of the software industry, and how to become better developers. The Making of BSD Hacks
Publish Date: Jun. 3, 2004Dru Lavigne, the author of BSD Hacks, and chromatic wanted to use open source tools to write and edit the book, so they turned to PseudoPOD and Subversion. chromatic writes about how they used these tools to collaborate, write, edit, and produce the book in record time. Paul Graham on Hacking
Publish Date: May. 27, 2004Paul Graham is a hacker, a painter, and an essayist known as much for his thoughtful writings on spam, hacking, and Lisp as for creating the Arc programming language. In this interview with the O'Reilly Network, Paul discusses hacking, creativity, computer science education, and language design. Paul's collection of essays has just been released in a new book from O'Reilly, Hackers & Painters.

Blog

When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron?

May 12 2008

My main computer these days is a laptop from System76. I was very happy to support a vendor willing to ship and support a laptop without the Microsoft or Apple tax, and very pleased to have hardware supported by a... read more

How Fresh is the CPAN?

May 08 2008

I like numbers. They can mean a lot of things. Rather than continuing silly arguments over obfuscated and flawed measurements of "language popularity", perhaps a better way of measuring the viability of a language or platform is to measure the freshness of... read more

Patrick Michaud on the Parrot Compiler Toolkit

May 05 2008

Patrick Michaud gave Rakudo Perl Talk to the Dallas/Fort Worth Perl Mongers last month. These slides are a great overview of the current status of Parrot's Compiler Toolkit and Rakudo Perl 6. Of particular note is Effectiveness of the Parrot Compiler Toolkit,... read more

How Small Businesses Can Support Community-Driven Projects

April 23 2008

I promised to explore the theme of Free-loading Adoption of F/OSS in more detail. Alan Rimm-Kaufman's Why Small Businesses Should Support Open Source is a great place to start: It doesn’t matter if your donation is large or small. It doesn’t matter... read more

Free-loading Adoption of F/OSS

April 22 2008

Matt Asay kicked up a small controversy in MySQL adoption: Deep and wide when he wrote: Now the only thing missing in that conversation is the enterprise stepping up to pay for some or all of its free-loading adoption of MySQL. This... read more

Parrot 0.6.1 Released

April 17 2008

Parrot hacker Jerry Gay released Parrot 0.6.1 on Tuesday. Parrot is a virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently, to allow them to interoperate in the same process, and to provide great compiler tools for building and modifying these languages. This... read more

"Just" Costs You Double

April 16 2008

Remember Andy Lester's rant about Can't You Just...?. There aren't often easy answers in any field. I really like what Chris Cummer had to say in a comment on "All I Need is a Programmer": Every time you use "just" to describe... read more

Where's the Cross-Platform -0.0 Knowledge?

April 14 2008

If you look at the CPAN test reports for Parrot, you'll see that the pernicious and persistent problems relate to odd bits of not-quite-always-cross-platform math, specifically floating point numbers and not-a-numbers. It's reasonably easy to find and read the C89 and POSIX... read more

Google App Engine Isn't the Only Grid in Town

April 11 2008

Didn't get one of the 10,000 golden tickets in special Google-brand chocolate bars? Python isn't your favorite language? Not sure about hosting your code and data with the world's largest ad broker? Never fear -- Google's not the only supercomputing grid in... read more

Multiple Dispatch Now, Please!

April 10 2008

If you've never usedmultiple dispatch, you're in for a treat. We've had it working in Parrot for years, but Jonathan Worthington just added the basics of MMD support to Rakudo (Rakudo is an implementation of Perl 6). Why do you want multiple... read more

Scaling F/OSS Development to Meet User Demand

April 09 2008

Benjamin Otte's Open Source will scale brings up an interesting point. If currently 1% of the world uses GNOME and it suddenly were 100x as many, we’d be at 40 million bugs right now. The persistent lie that increased usage guarantees hordes... read more

A Linux Driver Project status report

April 08 2008

Just over a year ago, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the Linux Driver Project, which combined education and mentoring with the promise to write Linux drivers for any hardware manufacturer willing to work with the project. Greg has just released the Linux... read more

A Short History of the Development of JavaScript

April 04 2008

At the 10 year anniversary of Mozilla's rebirth as a F/OSS project, Brendan Eich offered a short history of the development of JavaScript. In particular: The big debate inside Netscape therefore became "why two languages? why not just Java?" The answer was... read more

Web Apps Mean Never Having To Think About Your Processor

April 02 2008

Adobe has released a beta of AIR for Linux. Good news, everyone with a 64-bit processor, or PPC, or Sparc, or ARM, or anything more exotic than 32-bit x86. AIR for Linux Release Notes say that all you need is: Processor -... read more

Mistaking Cons for Pros

April 01 2008

I chuckled at a couple of quotes in Java performance improvements touted, specifically one from Cliff Click: As your program grows in size, the lack of strong typing basically kills your ability to handle a very large program and so you don't... read more

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