Jason Grey's Professional Site on jason grey

Enterprise Rust 2025: Overview

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to Enterprise Applications with Rust Link to heading

In the world of software development, the term “enterprise” often evokes images of bloated, legacy systems that are difficult to maintain and extend. However, this perception doesn’t capture the essence of what modern enterprise applications can and should be. In this blog series, we’ll explore how Rust—a language known for its performance, reliability, and increasingly rich ecosystem—is becoming a compelling choice for building enterprise-grade applications.

Machine Learning

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been doing AI/ML since 2005 - over 15 years.

K-Means
Markov Models
Bayesian networks
Association Rules
Collaborative Filtering/Recomendation Engines
Simple Neural Nets
Deep Learning Neural Nets
Semantic Web/LinkedData/Knowledge Graphs
WordNet
Image Classification
Object Identification
Segmentation

Enterprise Rust 2025: Framework Analysis

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Framework Analysis and Selection for Rust Enterprise Applications Link to heading

When building enterprise applications with Rust, selecting the right frameworks and libraries is crucial for long-term success. In this post, we’ll analyze the Rust ecosystem for enterprise development, providing data-driven comparisons and practical guidance for making informed decisions.

The Rust Framework Landscape Link to heading

Unlike ecosystems such as Java with Spring or .NET with ASP.NET, Rust doesn’t have a single dominant “enterprise framework” that provides an all-in-one solution. Instead, Rust follows a more modular approach, with specialized libraries that excel at specific tasks and can be composed together.

Algorithms & Techniques

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I once had to write a Java implementation of trie to do high performance substring matching, because it didn’t exist at the time.

Data Modeling: Hierarchical, Network/Graph, Value/Multi-Value, Object Oriented, Relational, Multidimensional
Data Warehousing: Kimball, Medallion
Specialized: R-Tree (spatial index), Bloom Filter (probabilistic set membership)
Caching, indexing, performance optimization: In-Memory, Distributed, HTTP, Filesystem
Advanced multi-layer debugging (any system)

Cloud and Infrastructure

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I may or may not have run a datacenter in my basement… :)

Co-Location/Physical/Datacenter
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Microsoft Azure
Google
Heroku
Rackspace

Data

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been using databases for 30 years… starting with Hypercard in 1994.

Raw/Binary, CSV, Tab, Fixed
TIGER Database (US Census Bureau Geographic database)
XML, JSON, BSON, RDF, XSD, OWL, RDFS, YAML
SQL, tSQL, SPARQL, LINQ, LDAP, MDX, XPath, XQuery
Redis, Memcache
MS SQL Server (including in-memory & columnstore indexes)
MS SQL Analysis Services
MySQL
MS Power BI/PowerPivot/SSAS Tabular Model, a little Oracle
CouchDB, Amazon DynamoDB, MongoDB, CosmosDB
Amazon SimpleDB, Cassandra
Azure Stream Analytics, Apache Spark
Neo4J, Stardog, Openlink Virtuoso
HDFS/Hadoop, Hive, HBase, custom MapReduce jobs
SSIS, Mule, RedPoint

Programming Languages

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been coding since age 6 or 7. That’s nearly 40 years… see photo below.

My first paid coding job was at age 14.

Python
GoLang
Rust
Java
JavaScript/NodeJS
C#
PHP
Perl
Ruby
ActionScript
Objective-C
ColdFusion
Countless shells, basics, and other scripting languages

My 9th Birthday... already a fan of computing...

Enterprise Rust 2025: Core Components

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Core Components for Rust Enterprise Applications Link to heading

Building robust enterprise applications requires careful consideration of core components that handle data persistence, communication between services, and message processing. In this post, we’ll explore how to implement these essential components in Rust, focusing on database management, modularization approaches, internal RPC mechanisms, and message queuing systems.

Database Management in Rust Link to heading

Data persistence is fundamental to most enterprise applications. Rust offers several approaches to database management, each with different trade-offs between type safety, performance, and developer experience.

Devops

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

When I first worked with AWS, they had 3 services… (S3, SQS, and EC2)

Kubernetes
Docker
Helm
Ant
Ivy
Maven
Atlassian Bamboo
Docker
Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMWare
Bitbucket Pipelines
Github Actions
Jenkins/Hudson

Search

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

In 1999, I hand-crafted a TD/IDF-based auto-completing search engine as a java applet which ran over the internet and locally via CD-ROM.

Solr
ElasticSearch
SQL Server Fulltext
Lucine
Google Search Appliance
Fast (now Microsoft)
Azure Cognitive

Enterprise Rust 2025: Web and API Development

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Web and API Development for Rust Enterprise Applications Link to heading

Building robust web services and APIs is a core requirement for most enterprise applications. In this post, we’ll explore how to develop high-performance, reliable web and API components using Rust, focusing on web servers, GraphQL APIs, and RESTful services.

Web Server Technologies in Rust Link to heading

Rust’s ecosystem offers several approaches to building web servers, from low-level HTTP libraries to full-featured web frameworks.

Enterprise Rust 2025: Application Development

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Application Development with Rust for Enterprise Systems Link to heading

Building enterprise applications requires a diverse set of tools and approaches depending on the target platform and user interface requirements. In this post, we’ll explore how Rust can be used to develop web, CLI, desktop, and mobile applications for enterprise environments.

Web Application Development Link to heading

Web applications are a common requirement for enterprise systems. Rust offers several approaches to building web frontends, from server-side rendering to WebAssembly.

Enterprise Rust 2025: Miscellaneous Tools

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Miscellaneous Tools for Rust Enterprise Applications Link to heading

Building enterprise applications requires more than just frameworks and libraries for core functionality. In this final post of our series, we’ll explore essential miscellaneous tools for Rust enterprise applications, focusing on observability, logging, and machine learning integration.

Observability in Rust Applications Link to heading

Observability is crucial for understanding the behavior and performance of enterprise applications in production. It encompasses metrics, logging, and distributed tracing.

Eddie (Experimental): Hybrid Search for Static Sites

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 1996, I worked on one of my first real search engines: an early Java applet that indexed a few thousand documents (for 3M Healthcare if I remember right…), distributed in parallel on CD-ROM (because laptops didn’t have wireless internet back then…) and on an early intranet website. It had instant word completion, which felt revolutionary at the time, and it used an early TF-IDF index with a static offline indexing process.

Open-Sourcing requirements-skill: Lightweight AI-Assisted Requirements Maintenance

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Open-Sourcing requirements-skill: Lightweight AI-Assisted Requirements Maintenance Link to heading

I just open-sourced a project I have been using to keep requirements work cleaner in fast, AI-assisted coding cycles:

Repository: github.com/jt55401/requirements-skill
Latest release: v0.2.0

The Problem Link to heading

AI-assisted teams can ship quickly, but requirement docs often drift from reality. The common failure modes are predictable:

broken links between requirements and tickets
duplicate or overlapping stories
conflicting acceptance criteria
weak traceability between requirement intent and actual implementation

Once this drift accumulates, teams lose confidence in requirements as a source of truth.

Scaling Airflow Dataset Scheduling: Lessons from Common Crawl

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Scaling Airflow Dataset Scheduling: Lessons from Common Crawl Link to heading

Since joining Common Crawl, I’ve been involved with a number of activities revolving around indexing and cataloging the integrity of our data. To coordinate these activites, and to be able to re-run them upon dataset changes, I decided to give Airflow a try. The introduction of dataset-based scheduling in Airflow 2.4 seemed attractive, but it also comes with interesting challenges when working at our scale.

AI: Evolution of Creative Tools, Not Theft of Creative Rights

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

AI: Evolution of Creative Tools, Not Theft of Creative Rights Link to heading

All art/tech is derivative. Every creator stands on the shoulders of those who came before them. Every innovation builds upon previous knowledge. This fundamental truth forms the basis of my perspective on AI ethics, which I’ll share below along with my further thoughts during a spirited debate in private chat recently.

The Evolution of Creative Tools Link to heading

Looking at human creativity from a historical perspective, we can see that tools have consistently evolved to compress the time it takes to master creative expression. In the Middle Ages, you might have studied and practiced with rudimentary tools for decades to build competence in any art form. As tools improved, this timeline shortened dramatically.

Named in patent: Basketball training system with computer vision functionality

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A patent I am named on has made it through the machinery of he US Patent Office:

Basketball training system with computer vision functionality (US 12194357 Issued Jan 14, 2025) Link to heading

A basketball training system that includes one or more of a basketball delivery machine, a computer vision sensor, one or more processors, and a computer-readable storage medium coupled to the one or more processors having instructions stored thereon which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations. The operations can include detecting a made or missed shot, identifying indexed video and/or pose information for the shot, tagging video and/or pose information with make or miss.

Launch of open source tool: gzinspector

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I published an open source tool “gzinspector” to inspect gzip streams - specifically those encoded with many chunks.

A robust command-line tool for inspecting and analyzing GZIP/ZLIB compressed files. GZInspector provides detailed information about compression chunks, headers, and content previews with support for both human-readable and JSON output formats.

I did this due to the work I’ve been doing for CommonCrawl - specifically around processing “ZipNum” format CDXJ indexes.

If you find it useful, let me know (reach out or star it on github.)

AI and the Right To Learn on an Open Internet

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my involvement with Common Crawl Foundation, I recently attended the “AI and the Right To Learn on an Open Internet: A Conversation Convened by Common Crawl Foundation and Professor Jeff Jarvis” in New York.

Jeff and Rich ended the conference by going wide and asking the entire group of attendees for next steps.

The suggestion I put forth was to pair the policy makers and lawyers with data scientists or software engineers to develop robust ways of validating whatever the policies might be.

Episode #15 Risky Business: Uncertain Impact of AI on White-Collar Jobs with Jason Grey

Thu, 18 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

See more on YouTube or Hear it on Spotify

Description Link to heading

Jason Grey, a fervent early adopter of AI and machine learning, knows firsthand the power and mystique surrounding this transformative technology. In this unsettling episode of Cupalo Conversations, Jason confronts the stark reality: AI’s impending impact on the job market. Foreshadowing a future where white-collar professions, like software engineering and law, will face a staggering reduction in available jobs.

Common Crawl Checker

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Enter a hostname, see if common crawl has it Link to heading

This checks CC-MAIN-2023-50 - which was from November/December 2023. I may update this in future to check the latest, but, for now, that’s what we have.

Give it a try here:

ML the ML - or, how to use ML to analyze the results of your hyperparameter tuning experiments (in Microsoft Fabric)

Sat, 06 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What are we talking about here? Link to heading

When one is training a model, one typically engages in a process called “hyperparameter tuning.” The model is trained many (10s, 100s, or 1000’s of) times, varying some of the inputs. This could be as simple as the number of epochs, or, could be as varied as taking different slices or ranges of input data (ie: different sensors from an array of many sensors, etc), different ML model structures, or, different parameters within that structure.

Miscellaneous Tools - Enterprise Rust

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Series Outline Link to heading

Overview
Framework analysis and selection: Delving into the specifics of framework selection and application.
1. Core Components: Database management, modularization, internal RPC, AMQP.
2. Web and API: Web Server, GraphQL API.
3. Application Development: Web, CLI, desktop, and mobile app development.
4. Miscellaneous Tools: Observability, logging, machine learning.
Boilerplate project: A comprehensive guide including setup instructions for selected frameworks, architectural diagrams, and development environment configurations.

ML/stats Link to heading

Crate	Downloads	Dependents	Github Stars	Github Contributors	Github Used By	Notes
polars	500k	88	21k	302	4.3k	Dataframes for data prep/filtering/etc - this is easily the best choice. Can now do streaming, so, can handle > in memory as well.
linfa	162k	24	3k	37	321	decent set of algorithms. OpenBLAS, netlib, intel MKL (all linux)
rustlearn	16k	1	599	8	121	Not nearly as robust as linfa, but does have some unique algorithms.

Logging/Metrics Link to heading

Crate	Downloads	Dependents	Github Stars	Github Contributors	Github Used By	Notes
log	197M	14770	1.9k	102	605k	Default choice. syslog, systemd, slog, android, windows, database, console, and a lot more.
tracing	109M	4967	4.4k	277	241k	Compatible with log, which is nice. metrics, tracing, and logging. wasm support.

Distributed Locking using Redis Link to heading

Redis is assumed for caching - but for dist lock, we have lots of options…

Application Development - Enterprise Rust

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Series Outline Link to heading

Overview
Framework analysis and selection: Delving into the specifics of framework selection and application.
1. Core Components: Database management, modularization, internal RPC, AMQP.
2. Web and API: Web Server, GraphQL API.
3. Application Development: Web, CLI, desktop, and mobile app development.
4. Miscellaneous Tools: Observability, logging, machine learning.
Boilerplate project: A comprehensive guide including setup instructions for selected frameworks, architectural diagrams, and development environment configurations.

Web Link to heading

Crate	Downloads	Dependents	Github Stars	Github Contributors	Github Used By	Notes
dioxus	100k	66	14.5k	169	1.2k	A virtual DOM for rust. Part of opencollective, has a large and growing community, and used by numerous startups, etc.
tauri	1.1M	69	70k	302	518	Very robust, but only desktop (and soon to be mobile)
yew	800k	186	28.8k	402	10.3k	Also open collective!. This is great, but web only.
egui	1.4M	240	17.1k	320	10.2k	Very opinionated, web+native. pre-built GUI components, could build an entire OS out of it. Ugly, and not very web-friendly though… for an admin tool though, this would be awesome (which is really what it’s made for)

Other Resources:

Web and API - Enterprise Rust

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Series Outline Link to heading

Overview
Framework analysis and selection: Delving into the specifics of framework selection and application.
1. Core Components: Database management, modularization, internal RPC, AMQP.
2. Web and API: Web Server, GraphQL API.
3. Application Development: Web, CLI, desktop, and mobile app development.
4. Miscellaneous Tools: Observability, logging, machine learning.
Boilerplate project: A comprehensive guide including setup instructions for selected frameworks, architectural diagrams, and development environment configurations.

Web Server Link to heading

In the realms of Java and .NET, a web application server serves as a critical component, providing an environment where web applications can run and manage web-based requests. Java has options like Apache Tomcat and WildFly, while .NET relies on servers like IIS or Kestrel. These servers handle a myriad of tasks including request processing, application lifecycle management, and security. In contrast, when it comes to Rust, a language still maturing in web development, selecting an appropriate web application server is not as straightforward. There isn’t a default go-to like in Java or .NET ecosystems. Instead, we need to explore and choose from emerging options such as Actix-Web, Rocket, or Warp, each offering unique features and performance characteristics tailored for Rust’s concurrency model and safety guarantees. This choice is pivotal to ensure efficient request handling, scalability, and robustness in Rust-based web applications.

Core Components - Enterprise Rust

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Series Outline Link to heading

Overview
Framework analysis and selection: Delving into the specifics of framework selection and application.
1. Core Components: Database management, modularization, internal RPC, AMQP.
2. Web and API: Web Server, GraphQL API.
3. Application Development: Web, CLI, desktop, and mobile app development.
4. Miscellaneous Tools: Observability, logging, machine learning.
Boilerplate project: A comprehensive guide including setup instructions for selected frameworks, architectural diagrams, and development environment configurations.

Modularization Link to heading

Modularization is important in big software projects. It’s like building with Lego blocks – each piece of code is its own little block. This makes it easier for different teams to work on their own parts without messing up the whole thing. It’s also great for fixing bugs and adding new features, since you only have to change one block at a time. Plus, you can reuse these blocks in other projects, saving time and hassle. In short, modularization keeps everything organized, flexible, and easy to handle, especially when things need to change fast.

Overview - Enterprise Rust

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction to Enterprise Applications Link to heading

The term “enterprise” in the context of software development often elicits mixed reactions. However, for the purpose of this discussion, let’s define an enterprise application as a comprehensive, collaboratively developed solution that adheres to high standards of long-term maintenance. Such an application is characterized by its modular design, both internally and externally, ease of integration, and its ability to address complex business challenges efficiently and reliably.

Maturity models for NLP and LLM usage: How to go from unsafe, unfocused results to focused, business-safe results.

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Gaurdrails Link to heading

What is the concept? A block of code, framework, or library which wraps around your request/response cycle with an LLM (or traditional NLP) to cross-check, verify, validate, or otherwise improve the accuracy and safety of the results.

Gaurdrails is a way to make your AI a bit more humble.

Examples of types of gaurdrails (blatantly stolen from NVIDIA’s framework’s docs)

Topical - keeping the chat or response on topic.
Fact checking - make sure the LLM response is true, according to some external data or service.
Moderation - profanity filtering, ethics adjustments, or other techniques to shut down non-useful interactions (ie: to save you cost!)
Jailbreaking attempts - protect the chat from adversarial interactions (ie: trying to get your bot to lie, or do bad or expensive activities)

Maturity model using LLM as the foundation: Link to heading

LLMs are powerful - but, can easily go “off the rails” and in a customer service scenario, that’s not good for business. Could be as benign as a bad restaurant recommendation, or as bad as giving improper advice on a medical issue.

AI for Natural Language Processing: Transforming Text Data into improving efficiency and engagement

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I spoke on Sept 7th. Recording of the session is here: https://vimeo.com/event/3685788

AI for Natural Language Processing: Transforming Text Data into improving efficiency and engagement Link to heading

Learn how AI-NLP techniques enable personalized user experiences, improve customer interactions, and drive higher engagement rates. From sentiment analysis to intelligent chatbots, we will showcase how AI-NLP powers efficient and engaging customer support. We will discuss the importance and implementation of guardrails in your model to ensure the returned results are accurate and on-topic.

Hyperparameter Tuning

Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Doing some data science tonight. When it came time to tune my hyperparameters, I remembered I still had an account at Weights & Biases and decided to give their “sweeps” feature a spin. Hyperparameter tuning is usually something I build into my notebooks/early scripts on a project and do it manually/simply. I have to say though, W&B made it pretty easy, their api is very easy to implement, is highly configurable, and has some pretty nice looking graphs to visualize what’s going on.

Migrations are hard...

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Watched this video today. It talks about how migrations are some of the harder problems in tech, but, nobody likes to work on them :)

I actually LIKE such migrations:

Challenging: Matt is very right - it is usually VERY hard to do this well.
Meta: You get to learn how someone else did something - and have to understand it enough to refactor it away gradually.
Rewarding: the migration usually needs to happen for some really interesting business/user experience reason.

Much of the focus of my professional life has been what I’d call “cleaning up other people’s messes” - migrating them from a messy/slow/non-expandable system to some new thing. Always during such projects one must think about how to elegantly migrate users from one system to another - ideally, without them even noticing. That’s the part I like the best - if I can pull it off without users noticing, I feel extra clever.

Certifications

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Link to heading

MCID: 13643987

Azure Solutions Architect Expert

Azure AI Engineer Associate

Link to heading

HuggingFace Link to heading

Future of Advertising: Infrastructure session

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Minneapolis College of Art and Design / Tim Brunelle · Feb 20, 2023

Guest speaker for future of advertising course. Session was on “infrastructure” - and spoke about how technology is part of the medium, the way to track, the way to transact, and the facilitator of creation.

See more on Tim’s blog

Keep things simple presentation at Hasty.ai

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hasty.ai / MLirl · Apr 7, 2022

Learn what hands-on advice the speakers from our #MLirl event on Apr 7th had when getting started with AI projects.

Open Source

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

1993 - Temple of the Dog Font - very first “shareware”/opensource project - I created a font from the handwriting on the Temple of the Dog album liner.
2004 - Handy - my first software open source project - some utilities for ColdFusion development
2007 - FlashDoctors - this was a bigger project I created while head of front-end development for Target. We worked with a lot of agencies at the time, and needed a consistent way to configure the data & behavior for LOTS of Adobe Flash applications. I ported the Spring framework from Java to Flash/Actionscript, and convinced Target to allow us to open source it. Flashdoctors was the result - it was one of the earlier corporate open source projects a the time.
2011 - Google+ “api” - At launch, Google+ had no public api - so I reverse engineered their rest calls, and created one in Java so folks could crawl their own social graphs. I also did an extensive crawl of the entire user base at the time - and did some cool graphs.
2015 - Smartthings Apps/Devices - When I was a Smarthings user, I open sourced some of my custom devices/apps.
2024 - commoncrawl I’m doing public & private work on commoncrawl. See also commoncrawl.org.
2024 - commoncrawl/cc-pyspark Made enhancements for file-wise processing.
2024 - commoncrawl/webarchive-indexing Migrated legacy mrjob tasks to modern spark jobs to process 9PB+ of data.
2024 - gz-inspector A robust command-line tool for inspecting and analyzing GZIP/ZLIB compressed files, written in rust.
2026 - requirements-skill Lightweight requirements-as-code starter kit with AI-assisted workflow support for Claude and Codex/OpenAI. Write-up: Open-Sourcing requirements-skill.

Startups

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

2006 - Evenhere - in the 2010’s, I was the lead technologist for Evenhere - helping them with Patent paperwork, as well as architecting and building their MVP.
2008 - incubator at Internet Broadcasting - developed an “internal” startup marketplace, and then was architect on one of the products - a “hyper local” news aggregation and search engine - developed using very early version of Hadoop, AWS, and was launched as a mobile app in week 1 in iOS app store.
2018 - MN Property Info - This is a company I started that created a mobile app for iOS and Android which shows tax parcel data from select MN counties. The key differentiation is that it includes both residential and commercial properties, which is particularly useful if you’re a commercial realtor.
2022 - Through Warecorp, I helped a startup build language analysis tools to aid in pitch deck authoring.
2023 - ~~a startup in the dining/entertainment space.~~
2023 - ~~a startup in the physical security space.~~
2023 - ~~a startup in the non-dilutive funding space.~~
2024 - In progress… a startup in the e-commerce space.
2025 - In progress… something in the AI/ML + Democracy space.

SmartThings device Enerwave scene controller

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Released SmartThings device and apps for Enerwave scene controller

A few scripts to handle the 7-button scene controller from Enerwave. Allows for control of lights, as well as setting of SmartThings mode.

Released a SmartThings app for logging data

Tue, 15 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Log SmartThings device events using JSON over HTTP POST (setup for FluentD, but can easily be modified to suit other backends)

Spoke at Minneapolis CIO Executive Summit

Wed, 03 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Minneapolis CIO Executive Summit · Jun 3, 2015

Jason Grey explains how to use the net promoter score methodology to enhance departments both internally and externally.

Spoke at Microsoft Convergence 2015

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the “Reinventing business productivity to maximize customer value" session with Julia White at Microsoft Convergence 2015, Jason Grey from Life Time Fitness shared how Microsoft technology has helped the organization increase productivity and the flow of information across their 24,000 employees. Watch the highlights at http://youtu.be/5N1rc7ZW2bI and learn more about Microsoft Convergence at http://www.microsoft.com/convergence

Google+ Java API Launched

Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Quick note – I created a quick and dirty Google+ API using Java. It lets you get at public profiles, followers and following, as well as recent posts.

Code is available on Google Code

I have a social graph visualizer done as well, but it’s not quite ready for prime time.

Watching Tech Trends

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000

A few interesting ways I keep an eye on longer term technology trends.

Google Trends: php, coldfusion, java, .net, ruby (This one has some problems, as “java” comes up for the country too…)

Freshmeat Tags, sourceforge

Indeed (job listing aggregator)

Drill down to Java ORM frameworks (and JDBC itself)

mn.swf 2009 presentation & links

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Jason’s Presentation:

http://swfcamp-2009-shopper.googlecode.com/files/API%20design%2C%20modularization%20and%20components.pdf

Code can be obtained here: http://swfcamp-2009-shopper.googlecode.com/

Joshua Bloch, Google, Inc., USA How To Design a Good API and Why it Matters:

http://lcsd05.cs.tamu.edu/slides/keynote.pdf

Excerpt from Practical API design book by Jaroslov Tulach

http://openide.netbeans.org/tutorial/api-design.html

Great book about reusability:

Will Tracz - Confessions of a Used Program Salesman, Addison-Wesley, 1995

What makes a good component/service?

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000

A few collected thoughts & notes from around the web regarding what makes a good component/service.

Interface - all implementations share this. Should have few methods, use data objects as return values, take primitives as inputs, throw only custom exceptions, and be very, very well documented.
Implementations - implement the logic behind the service. May provide extra features such as caching, or such things as optional collaborations.
Data - data objects this service deals with. Should be immutable, comparable, cloneable as much as is possible. Should be serializable/XML/Persistance annotated in most languages.
Storage - Data (or data.io) package should define storage API, and an in-memory data store. Allow other services/projects/subprojects to define database backed or other kinds of data stores.
Cache - Data.Cache packages should define cache API? (or can this be standard per runtime?) Who should be in charge of caching? The service itself, or the user of the service?
Use dependency injection for all services/data stores it requires. Use constructor-injection as much as possible.
Throw errors early - in constructor if possible.
Exceptions - custom exceptions for high level categories of erroneous behavior (try not to do one for every possible condition - classify, and wrap). * Don’t re-throw exceptions from other frameworks - wrap in custom exception.
Make behavior configurable via dep injection as much as possible. Use filters or strategies.
Inject 1 configuration object instead of many options. Standardize on configuration API/Framework for each runtime/language.
Standardize on logging framework/API for each runtime/language, and make sure it’s used (instead of System.out or similar)
Provide events/messages and/or hooks for important happenings so others can do things pre/post.

Evenhere @ MIT EmTech conference

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

One of the products I’ve been working on for a number of years now is getting some visibility in a very cool way - the owner of the company is going to be exhibiting the product at the MIT EmTech conference in September this year.

The product is called Evenhere - its a platform for enabling product placement along a video time-line. The results can be presented on the web, on a set top box, or in any number of other interesting ways. See the website for more information.

⚠️iPhone development thoughts

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve recently finished the functionality of my first native iPhone application. Here are some thoughts:

Apple makes it easy to “do the right thing” as far as the UIKit libraries go, pretty nice, and cleaner & easier than Swing or .NET in many ways. Very humanistic.
Unless I’m missing something, common tasks like field validation don’t seem to be built-in, that’s a hassle…
No SOAP libraries yet either.
Interface Builder isn’t quite there yet - many components still missing, so unless you’re doing a pretty simple UI, better code it by hand (which isn’t really that bad…)
I’m not a huge fan of XCode - the code completion is very weak compared to eclipse, as is the display of errors/warnings - many more clicks/research needed to diagnose what’s going on.
Managing your own memory sucks…
Since I’m coding the UI by hand, lining things up pixel perfect is quite a hassle. I’d be nice if they had the concept of a layout manager, like Swing/AWT, laying out components in a grid is not intuitive (many examples I’ve seen use UITableView and a whole mess of ugly switch statements - very inconvenient & hard to maintain.)

The application is a front end for a project I’ve been working on for the last few months. The backend of the project is very involved, lots of data flying around, and much analysis, the end result of which is exposed via a few web services. One to find a location based on name, lat/lon, etc, and one to get news near that location (sort of like topix in some ways).

Presenting at mn.swf camp 2008

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll be presenting development best practices in the Flex/Flash/AIR tomorrow at mn.swf camp. Check back on this post for a copy of the presentation after I’m done.

Here is my presentation.

Learn objective-c/Cocoa (Mac OSX) development on the PC…

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000

So, I got interested in developing an application for the iPhone, but I don’t have a decent Mac to develop on. I found that the iPhone development is based on a subset of the Mac Cocoa framework. OSX came from NeXTStep. Cocoa is mostly NeXTStep libraries… hummm… how can I learn Objective-C/Cocoa on a PC… let me think…

Download and install GNUStep System and Core for windows.
Learn & write some objective-c code using some of the NS libraries
Compile using gcc (comes with GNUStep). I use ant, my build file is attached - fiddle with it to work in your environment
You may also have to have CygWin installed. I’m not actually sure which pieces are making this all work yet, so give that a try (install the base package, plus gcc, gdb, and whatever else you like)

Currently, I’ve got this all working, and I’m using the Foundation library in the attached example. Going to try getting some UI stuff to work next.

Want to see what the temperature is in Minneapolis?

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This is an embeddable from a site I did the technical architecture work for that launched recently for KMBC Kansas City, and will be rolled out to many other TV station sites soon. Give it a click to view the entire experience.

⚠️First thoughts on Microsoft Silverlight

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Cool that it can work with plain JS and XML
Fast rendering engine
Cross platform/browser
MediaElement events not great - may be due to the beta version.

I’m currently working on a very simple video player in SilverLight that will be controlled via JavaScript.

⚠️Object Oriented Programming

Mon, 20 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most important concepts you can learn is Object Oriented programming. Once OOP is mastered, learning any object style language becomes much simpler. Common OOP languages used on the web: Java, C#, as well as scripting languages such as JavaScript, and ActionScript.

Check out this wikipedia article for a general overview of OOP and many links out to OOP theory, and even a few links about what’s BAD about

⚠️Check out Google Base

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Google’s got another great beta out there - Google Base. It’s a place for you to post your own content. They take it a step further by allowing you to define (or use predefined) content types. Each content type has a set of attributes. Then, custom search interfaces are provided against the content types, for example, see recipes. Doesn’t seem like there’s an API out there yet, so I think this is of limited use for now.

Handy is going open source...

Fri, 05 Mar 2004 00:00:00 +0000

There were a few sugestions by members of the CF community to make Handy CFC tester open source… so I’m going to give it a try.

Along with the move to open source, I’m going to make “Handy” more of a suite of usefull ColdFusion/Mach-II stuff. To be included at launch will be:

Handy/TestSuite/index.cfm - the Handy CFC browser/tester.
Handy/BeanGen/index.cfm - a simple utility to generate CFCs with Java Bean get/set methods. Usefull if you do any Mach-II development.
handy.dao - a base class for all my dao objects, has only one fuction right now to convert results of a query to a struct - for passing instance data to an object (memento).
handy.validatable - a base class for all my objects which need to have a “validate” funciton. Has functions for keeping track of what’s wrong with certain fields, or in general.
handy.plugins.ServerProperties - lets you have mach-ii properties defined outside of the mach-ii config file - usefull if you want to manage mach-ii with Source control, but need different properties on different servers.
handy.plugins.EventData - allows you to have an XML config file to specify data for events. You can also specify other buckets of data which you can include on specified events (like an include) This allows powerful setup of meta-data per-event, but doesn’t tie you to your mach-ii.xml file to do so.
Handy/MachIIMapper/index.cfm - maps a mach-ii application in many ways. Requires GraphViz to be installed, and you need CFEXECUTE permissions.

I’m submitting “Handy Suite” to SourceForge today, so with any luck, I’ll have all the code and docs up there, along with the CVS repository.

Humn, thats handy...

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 00:00:00 +0000

http://handy.jason-thorpe.com/

Handy is a browser and testing framework for ColdFusion CFCs. Just drop it in a directory of ColdFusion CFC’s, and browse to it in your web browser. Full instructions are below, and included in the download.

Mach-II first blush

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 00:00:00 +0000

I recently have evaluated the Mach-II framework for ColdFusion MX. I started by developing our company holiday party RSVP website. It used a pretty simple form bean, and some standard “manager”, “dao”, and “gateway” objects, as shown in the Mach-II developer guide. My initial thoughts are very favorable:

Cleanly supports writing your code in a re-useable way.
Much more object oriented than fusebox.
Very good framework for MVC development.
Fast - I like how many objects are stored in application scope, so they don’t have to be instantiated every request.

I’ve also started developing some base objects, filters, plug-ins and other useful tools which others may find useful, I’ll post them up here soon.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Understood. I will compile a comprehensive CIA-style intelligence dossier on you, Jason Grey, incorporating all publicly known data—professional history, online presence, and behavioral patterns. The report will highlight both constructive capacities and latent risks, with each observation framed through the lens of strategic, operational, and security implications.

I’ll get started and let you know as soon as the full analysis is ready.

Intelligence Dossier: Jason Grey Link to heading

Executive Summary Link to heading

Jason Grey is a Minneapolis-based technology executive and engineer, currently serving as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Warecorp and as a Senior Engineer with the Common Crawl Foundation (Common Crawl - Team - Jason Grey). He has amassed over three decades of experience across web, mobile, and enterprise software domains, tackling complex projects for Fortune 100 companies and startups alike (My project - April 20, 2023 at 15.03.37) (Common Crawl - Team - Jason Grey). Grey’s public persona is that of a highly skilled innovator and leader with a reputation for challenging the status quo through smart, unconventional solutions (My project - April 20, 2023 at 15.03.37). His digital footprint (including personal websites and technical blogs) portrays a forward-thinking technologist who actively engages in discussions on AI, open data, and software architecture.

Front-End

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

My first HTML work was in 1994, while I was in a mentorship program at Cray Research. I was using an SGI workstation and early version of Mosaic web browser.

HTML5
Xamarin, iOS/Cocoa, Android, J2ME
CSS, Bootstrap
jQuery, Prototype/script.aculo.us, MooTools
Knockout, AngularJS, Backbone.js, Dojo
Handlebars, Jade
YUI, Ext JS
Google Web Toolkit
Flash/Flex
Java AWT and Swing
Microfrontends (long before they were even called that…)

Imaging/Video

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

ASP.NET
J2EE
J2SE
Estimote SDK
Hybernate (both Java and .NET), EntityFramework
Tomcat, Glassfish, JBoss, and some experience with Oracle & IBM
Ruby on Rails
Node.js, Express
Jena (Semantic Web)
R
SmartThings, HomeSeer
Mahout, OpenNLP, Weka, RapidMiner

Imaging/Video

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Various frameworks in Java, Python, .NET, and more.
OpenCV
PIL
ImageMagik (PHP, .NET and Java integrated)
Scene7 (and other DAMs and DAM-like systems)
Scripting of numerous Adobe products including InDesign, Photoshop, and AfterEffects
Adobe Media Encoder

Platforms & Apps

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

IIS, Apache1, Apache2, Nginx
SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Netsuite, Odoo, Hubspot, SAP, Microsoft Dyanmics AX
Adobe AEM, SiteCore, LifeRay, SharePoint, Documentum, Vignette, Alfresco, Sitefinity, DaisyCMS
Wordpress, Drupal, NukePHP, Joomla
Hybris, ElasticPath, osCommerce, Magento 2
Paypal, Authorize.NET
Vertex
USPS, UPS, Fedex
XMLSpy
Google Maps, Microsoft MapPoint, Yahoo Map API
Facebook apps, Twitter integration
Datasift, Radian6
Exact Target, MailChimp, Twilio

Process

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Vendor selection
Mergers & Acquisition Due Diligence
Agile/Scrum/XP
Kanban
Waterfall
BPMN/BPML