Flickr and Netflix web portals, etc.

Work wise, working on interactive read/write web portals is one of the most fun things I do (in addition to artificial intelligence stuff). I have to admit more than a little professional jealousy whenever, as a consumer, I use the Netflix and Flickr portals. Beautifully done.

As a developer, I feel like I have the server side plumbing down cold, but I really need to perfect my Javascript skills. One thing that I feel that has really helped me in the last year is cutting down on the number of programming languages that I use: except for some of my personal AI research and a few smaller contracting jobs, I have been just using Ruby and Java. It is difficult to largely give up Common Lisp, Prolog and Scheme, but except for a major runtime performance hit, Ruby really is good enough for most of the stuff that I do and I think Ruby on Rails and server side Java is all I need for web development. Ruby and Java nicely cover my requirements for programming languages because they tend to be very good for different tasks.

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