My (non-spoilery) opinion of the new Star Wars movie

The short version: I absolutely loved it. Can't wait to see it again (and again, and again...).

But, like every other Star Wars movie, it has issues...

Visually, the movie is perfect. It looks and feels like a modern Star Wars movie should: Gritty, real, with a solid combination of digital and practical effects that don't feel overproduced and cartoonish like the prequels did. Some of the scenes are absolutely incredible (The scene showing Poe in action made my inner child scream gleefully). If Lucas had done things right when he re-released the original trilogy - and done the prequels as well - those movies should have looked exactly like this movie. In fact, I think this movie looks like what the original trilogy could be if someone had simply done a remake of the originals.

Which brings me to what's bugging me...

The Force Awakens feels far too much like J.J.'s attempt at a remake, without actually doing a remake...which left me a little disappointed. The story wasn't bad, but it didn't feel original, either. Nor do I feel like it added anything to the Star Wars Universe - I give Lucas some credit that, despite the prequels being horrible on many levels, he was actually trying to add something to the universe from a story perspective. I didn't get any of that sense from this movie (in fact I feel like the Star Wars Universe shrunk a bit with this movie - without going any farther lest I spoil the movie, I had some issues with the universe in which this movie is living). I could also see the big plot point at the end of the movie coming from a mile away, it was that predictable. Or, maybe I've just been into Star Wars for so long that I couldn't help but see it. In either case I wasn't surprised by it at all, which bothered me.

I also feel like this movie doesn't stand completely on it's own: It seems that only after Episodes VIII and IX are released will we get a better picture of the story and be able to judge it appropriately which is kind of bothersome. The movie doesn't really end, as such, which left me kinda depressed (I guess that's what happens when you have the writer of The Empire Strikes Back involved...).

Mind you these are relatively minor gripes. This movie is still really good. Great effects. Great acting all around (from both old and new casts) and characters that I want to see more of. I can't wait to see where they takes this, which is exactly what a Star Wars movie should be doing: Leaving me wanting more.

At least J.J. got that part right...

A couple of weeks ago I decided to pick up a new ergonomic keyboard for my home PC setup: The Microsoft Sculpt

While I'm not a particularly huge fan of Microsoft, I've always had a fondness for their ergonomic keyboards, having owned just about every iteration going all the way back to the original Microsoft Natural Keyboard. Sure, they're no Kenesis, but they do tend to provide better comfort over a standard keyboard for a moderate price.

The Sculpt is Microsoft's newest ergonomic offering, and I think it is their best iteration to date. It replaces the aging Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 in their product lineup - the very keyboard I replaced with my recent purchase. The Sculpt isn't perfect, but I do think it does a good job of hitting the mark in terms of affordability and comfort.

Unlike previous versions, Microsoft's Sculp is a compact, sleek keyboard that isn't just a rehash of the same old design: They've removed a considerable amount bulk from the device which has drastically reduced it's overall footprint and given it a more modern look. The Sculpt actually looks good sitting on a desk, which is something that you don't often get to say when talking about an ergonomic keyboard.

As part of this slimming down, Microsoft has opted to make the numeric keypad its own separate peripheral. This separation probably won't bother most users, but it is something that might bother someone who makes heavy use of the the keypad in their day-to-day work. However, since most ergonomic keyboards tend to take up a lot of desk space in general, breaking off the numeric keypad goes a long way toward making the Sculpt keyboard much more desk-friendly compared to its predecessors: Combined with a lower profile, the narrower width, sans-keypad, means the keyboard should fit nicely on desk keyboard drawers/trays - something that previous models always had a hard time with. It also allows for a mouse to sit much closer at hand in a more comfortable, ergonimically-appropriate location, which is something the older model keyboards made nearly impossible.

Speaking of lower profile, another aspect of the size reduction of the Sculpt keyboard comes in the form of flatter keys that seem to have a shorter keystroke and require much less effort to push into contact with the underlying switches. These changes make for a much more pleasant typing surface compared to older models: My hands glide effortlessly over the shorter keys and I find myself typing much faster and with more confidence (I'm noticing far fewer fat-finger typos) than I have with past versions.

Microsoft also decided to reorganize the auxillary key arrangment and bring them closer to the main typing keys: Arrow keys, page-up/page-down, etc. all have been reconfigured into a more convenient configuration for touch typists. A larger delete key (conveniently placed near backspace) and a vertical orientation to the page-up, page-down, home and end keys make all the keys much easier to reach than the convential setup. Of course, if you're used to the standard arrangment this will take some getting used to. But with a little practice, it's not too difficult adjust to the new configuration.

The only design change that's a negative is the function keys: The entire row of function keys, along with the print screen, scroll lock and pause keys have all been shrunken down considerably along the top. This is the one feature that I'm actually not too happy with: The keys are just too small to reliably hit and when pressing down they feel a bit wobbly and it's sometimes hard to tell when a key has been successfully pressed. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the keys on the keyboard, which feel good and solid and there's definite feedback from the keypress to ensure that you've hit them properly. I'm not sure why Microsoft felt they needed to reduce the size of these particular keys - I think the keyboard would have been just fine with full-size function keys - but this is the one change that didn't need to be made.

On a more positive note, Microsoft dropped the annoying multimedia keys that lived above the function keys on the 4000. These were rather useless and were more of an annoyance since it was all too easy to accidentally hit them when reaching for a function key. They also changed the alternate function switch (a switch that allowed the function keys to be toggled into an alternate mode and used for some Windows-specific features), opting for a physical switch that has to be flipped on/off. This is a vast improvement over the 4000, which had a soft switch/key next to the F12 button...making it way too easy to hit accidentally (something I did all too frequently).

With all of the changes Microsoft has made to their ergonomic keyboard, and despite a few minor design issues, I've enjoyed using this keyboard over the past few weeks. In fact, after only the first couple of days using the the Sculpt at home I decided to order a second keyboard for my system at work. I like it that much. The Sculpt keyboard design feels considerably more confortable than previous models, and I can go much longer typing/hacking/whatever before my hands get stiff or tired.

I think Microsoft did a really good job with the Sculpt keyboard. If you're in the market for an ergonomic keyboard and don't want to break the bank, I would definitely recommend trying the Sculpt.

During a No Fluff Conference that I attended a few years ago, I had the fortune to sit in on Neal Ford's talk on Building a Technology Radar. At the time I found the idea intriguing, and thought it would be advantageous to leverage this for personal tech evaluation, but for whatever reason I was never able to get the ball rolling.

Now, looking back at the past year (or two), I'm finding myself a bit frustrated by my lack of focus on new technologes. I was able to dig into some stuff - I managed to dive into AngularJS a bit, for instance - but I still feel like I could have done better and should have had a more focused approach to the whole thing. So I figure what better way to handle the situation than to try and throw up my own radar of sorts here and use this site as a way for evaluating technologies that I think are worth paying attention too.

I'm not going to go all-out (not yet, anyway) and build a full-blown technology radar like Neal suggests, but I'm hoping that just listing some of the tech I'm interested in here will help me get the process rolling and get me more focused on evaluating some new tech.

With any luck, I'll be able to follow up this post with more information and evaluation of the various items I list here. And I hope to revist this list in a year (or maybe sooner) to see where things are and how good/bad I may have been at tackling some of the items listed.

Languages/Frameworks

JavaScript UI frameworks are likely going to see a lot of rapid evolution this year and we're probably going to see a lot of cool ideas come to the fore as well. I think we're going to see a lot of awesome stuff on the JavaScript framework front in 2015.

AngularJS

Like I mentioned above, I was able to dive into AngularJS last year thanks to an opportunity that arose in my workplace which allowed me to take AngularJS for a spin. While I don't feel like I was able to leverage the framework as well as I could have I found it an interesting system to work with and I'm listing it hear as something to revisit or explore further.

I'm curious how poor UI performance is addressed going forward, as this is something I encounted in my own development effort (I think there was a bit of lack-of-experience on my part affecting performance as well). It seems like the Angular devs are already well on the way to addressing a lot of rough spots in the framework, so I'll be interested to see how things shake out.

That being said, I think Angular is going to continue to be one of the bigger players in this space, so I'm planning to focus on it more this year.

React and Flux

I'm grouping these two together since, while they are in fact separate frameworks they seem like they are really intended to work together.

I think these frameworks, much like AngularJS, are trying to solve the UI state-management problem that every JavaScript-heavy UI inevitably gets tangled up in. React doesn't seem too terribly different from some of the things that AngularJS accomplishes, but it's different enough that I think it warrants a peek at some point this year. Given that it's been developed by Facebook, I expect that it's well focused on high performance - something that not everyone tends to do well on the JavaScript side (especially the current version of AngularJS).

Polymer

I am very intrigued by this project. My brief foray into using this system last year makes me think that it - and Web Components in general - could potentially render systems like Angular and React obsolete, or at the very least drastically simplify UI development in ways that haven't been possible in the past.

This project is still in the super-early-alpha stage and has a looooong way to go, but I am definitely planning to keep an eye on it.

Go

As far as back-end technologies go, I've had a desire to expand my expertise out of the Java ecosystem for quite some time now (most of my work these days is Groovy/Grails), and the Go programming language seems like it's been gaining more and more traction with each passing day.

I've been intrigured by Go for a while now and I feel like it's something important to at least play around with in some capacity given it's slow-and-steady rise in popularity. The laguage and the ecosystem that's growing around it seems to be a paradigm-shifting approach to modern web development, and I'm always curious about languages/systems that turn things on their head or just take a radically different approach to the whole thing.

Clojure

Clojure has been around for quite a while now, and I've been wanting to give it a spin for just about it's entire existence. Clojure has piqued my interest in much the same way as Go, and it has continued to grow it's ecosystem and tooling and seems like a very solid language to build real-world systems with.

While it doesn't totally get me away from Java-land (it's a JVM-based language), being a Lisp-like language it has always held strong on my radar over the years. I took the time to learn Lisp many years before Clojure ever existed and I have always been eager to see what a Lisp (or something similar) might be capable of in a modern development project.

Platforms

NodeJS

I've done some prototyping using NodeJS, Express and MongoDB and while that was certainly an enjoyable experience, I'd like to push things even further and actually build a production-level system using it.

I know the NodeJS community has encountered a bit of schism as of late, but I don't think that's going to have major impact on Node's mindshare going forward. If anything it might actually help the ecosystem even more.

Docker

I'll be honest: I've had a hell of a time wrapping my brain around Docker. It's not that I don't necessarily understand the system, but rather a case of the problems that it appears to be solving aren't currently issues I have to contend with in my day-to-day work.

I have no doubt that it's a useful system, but I'm just not sure how useful it would be to me right now. I'm still keeping this on the radar as something to explore if the opportunity avails itself, but probably won't actively pursue...yet.

Tools

emacs

Yes, I'm putting emacs on my list of tools to explore.

I was a pretty active user of emacs years ago, but it fell by the wayside when I got more into the Java ecosystem - there are tools for leveraging emacs as a Java IDE, but they pale in comparison to the tools available in Eclipse and IntelliJ (and IntelliJ is especially good for doing Groovy/Grails development).

As I start exploring other languages/systems like Go and NodeJS, I expect that I would be better positioned to revist a robust editor like emacs, so I'm hoping I can get myself back into the emacs world for development...because despite all the awesome stuff in modern IDEs I still kind of miss emacs.

Techniques

Material Design

I think what Google has been trying to do with their Material Design initiative has a lot of merit, and I think it's something worth digging into and trying to use on a project. Fortunately some of the technologies I'm looking at exploring - AngularJS and Polymer, specifically - have some built-in support for Material Design already, so building a UI that leverages Google's guidelines shouldn't be too difficult.

I feel like I need to beef up my design chops a bit in general anyway - developers as a whole should have a better understanding of design these days - as we're moving into an era where UI/UX design is starting to be a big factor in the success or failure of a product.

JavaScript Unit Testing

This is just a general catch-all for my desire to beef up my understanding and capabilities when it comes ot unit testing JavaScript code - soemthing that I desperately need to improve upon if I'm going to leverage any of the newer frameworks I'm looking at.

Well, it's a lot of stuff to mess with in a year, and I'm sure there will be some other things that pop up during the year that I might want to have on my radar, but right now this is what I'm looking at tackling.

I hope to follow up this post with some more in-depth discussions of the technologies that I do get a change to play with.

Stay tuned.