puts Blog.new(”nonsense”)

What’s Under Your Monitor?

Posted by Jason Rudolph on April 25th, 2008

Muness blogged a photographic introduction to the Relevance mothership, and Glenn Vanderburg went all meta on us and asked what we could learn from comparing the books in active use on the desks to the less fortunate books relegated to use as monitor stands.§

200804 Relevance Monitors 1 Thumb

Wired? Erlang.
Expired? RMI.

200804 Relevance Monitors 2 Thumb

The JDBC API Tutorial is just as interesting as the 2008 Sam’s Club Office Products Catalog.

200804 Relevance Monitors 3 Thumb

We’d rather wrestle a grizzly than read even one more paragraph about XML.

Well, Glenn, in geek terms, it’s safe to say that if these books were elements in an LRU cache, they’d be purged by now. As for the technologies referenced in said books, I find it interesting that they all have one thing very much in common. By and large, we simply don’t need to think about them as much as we once did. Some certainly remain more relevant than others, but thanks to abstractions (and abstractions built on top of those abstractions), we just have no need to wade through the plumbing of technologies like JDBC. That’s (thankfully) the job of a good framework.

What’s under your monitor?

§ The new Dell 30-inchers don’t need any help.

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4 Responses to “What’s Under Your Monitor?”

  1. Andres Almiray Says:

    Dell monitors and Apple keyboards? the horror, the horror ;-)

  2. Rob Sanheim Says:

    I think you meant abstractions like this or this. If we had any hibernate or gorm books in the office, those would be relegated to monitor stands as well.

  3. jcblitz Says:

    I have “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites”, ISBN 0596527349. I only needed about 3/4″ of a boost, so Information Architecture seemed appropriate.

  4. Adalbert Blumenkohl Says:

    AlphaStation 200 4/100 (it still works, although I only power it up to scare people away with its noisy scsi hds)