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

Open Source in the Enterprise is Inevitable

July 23 2008

The question about open source in the enterprise is no longer "if", but "how". Bernard Golden is the author of a new O'Reilly research report about adoption statistics and usage of open source in professional development and business -- who are hiring more open source people than ever. read more

At OSCON with the Mad Scientest of Perl ...In Negative Time

July 23 2008

Damian Conway has a well-deserved reputation as the mad scientist of Perl. His opening night keynote at OSCON 2008 combined Perl programming, the difference engine, quantum mechanics, and general relativity to produce variables which travel backwards in time. read more

Announcing Perl on Google's App Engine

July 23 2008

Perl hacker and Googler Brad Fitzpatrick just announced a Google-supported, community-driven project to support the Perl language on Google's App Engine. read more

Tuesday's OSCON Event Schedule

July 22 2008

OSCON is happening right now at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, bringing together thousands of experts, visionaries, and hackers in the trenches to explore all that open source has to offer. Today's afternoon sessions include: - Creating Location-aware Web 2.0 Applications on an Open Source Geospatial Platform -… read more

What to See at OSCON 2008

July 21 2008

O'Reilly News interviews Allison Randal, co-chair of OSCON, for a quick survey of what's new and interesting in the world of open source. read more

Dan Kaminsky: Upgrade Your DNS Now!

July 15 2008

DNS is the fundamental human-friendly abstraction of the Internet. It maps names such as oreilly.com to addresses computers can understand. Yet there are flaws in the protocol, which mean that malicious users can redirect your request for oreilly.com for their own nefarious purposes. Security researcher Dan Kaminsky discovered this danger… read more

The Software Behind the Mars Phoenix Lander

July 09 2008

What kind of software does it take to send a 700+ pound device millions of miles away to land safely on another planet? Peter Gluck is the project software engineer for the Mars Phoenix lander mission. In this interview with O'Reilly News, he describes how rocket scientists write and manage… read more

A Beginner's Introduction to Perl 5.10, part three

June 26 2008

Modern Perl development is quick, easy, powerful, and maintainable. Doug Sheppard and chromatic demonstrate how to find and manipulate text in documents with regular expressions. read more

Todd Ogasawara on Microsoft Competing with F/OSS

June 25 2008

On Port 25, Todd Ogasawara asks Does Microsoft Really Need to "Compete" With Open Source? According to Ray Ozzie, the competition has led directly to interoperability concerns -- and interoperability means cooperation, at least once you reach the point of... read more

Using Green to Sell ZFS

June 20 2008

What's most interesting to me about Jonathan Schwartz's Anything But a Flash in the Pan isn't the argument that solid-state storage devices will make servers faster, more reliable, and less power-hungry. (If you pay attention to Brian Aker -- of... read more

One-Bit Social Networking Doesn't Work

May 30 2008

Giles Bowkett's Never Hate. Only Destroy. (disclosure: contains language your local third graders probably use and your work filter might block as inappropriate) contains a side point which crystallized something I've pondered for several weeks: The whole point of the Cory Doctorow... read more

How to Add a Feature to Perl 5

May 29 2008

Yesterday's How to Patch Perl 5 explained the big picture of how to add a new feature to a dynamic language with a virtual machine. Now it's time to discuss the technical details.... read more

How To Patch Perl 5

May 28 2008

Perl 5 change #33858 adds three new features from Perl 6 to Perl 5.12. With recent interest in implementations of dynamic languages on various virtual machines, I thought it interesting to discuss how a feature comes about and how it works --... read more

From "Interesting" to "Uninterested" in a Sentence

May 22 2008

The ever-creative Wade Olson (of KDE fame) tells an interesting story of immediately losing interest in otherwise-interesting hardware due to "Intellectual Property" protections. He caught himself going from caring to not caring in the time it took to read the phrase "Don't... read more

Parrot 0.6.2 "Reverse Sublimation" Released (and Perl 6 Progress)

May 21 2008

You know the drill by now. You can read the Parrot 0.6.2 release announcement on your own. User-visible improvements include a tremendous amount of progress in Rakudo (Perl 6 on Parrot), including better object orientation, placeholder variables, and type checking. Much of... read more

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