The Left Field

Sean has a reputation for a take on technology that can seem to be "out of left field," but is guaranteed to get you thinking. Sometimes contrarian, always insightful, he offers a unique perspective on the practice of programming and on technology in general.

by Sean McGrath

Sean McGrath is CTO of Propylon. He is an internationally acknowledged authority on XML and related standards. He served as an invited expert to the W3C's Expert Group that defined XML in 1998. He is the author of three books on markup languages published by Prentice Hall.

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The decline and fall of the relational database

Posted Nov 28, 2009 - 01:24 pm

Are we seeing the beginning of the end of world domination by the relational database?
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- Storage, RDB, relational database
The decline and fall of the relational database

Posted Nov 28, 2009 - 01:23 pm

Are we seeing the beginning of the end of world domination by the relational database?
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- Storage, RDB, relational database
Ruby, DSLs and the free lunch that was not so free

Posted Sep 21, 2009 - 09:42 am

The world of IT is embarking, I suspect, on a another period of language creation hype. This time, the hype epicenter is Ruby and the facilities it provides to create custom languages.
Future techtorials

Posted May 19, 2009 - 04:01 pm

I'm soliciting feedback/suggestions on the techtorials I have been doing with ITworld.
Career damaging self description

Posted May 16, 2009 - 10:12 am

"I am a X programmer" (for arbitrary values of X), is not a good way to describe yourself in my opinion. This techtorial talks about why.
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- Career, Careers
Is it secure?

Posted May 15, 2009 - 10:55 am

An awkward question deserves a somewhat awkward answer. "Is it secure?". Its really all about residual risk calculation.
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- Security, encryption, risk
Loose coupling?

Posted Mar 31, 2009 - 09:32 am

My take on loose coupling.
Techtorials - An experiment with an electronic sheet of foolscap

Posted Mar 26, 2009 - 03:48 pm

I spend a lot of time drawing pictures to explain technical concepts. How can that medium - the quick paper-based sketch - be best turned into a web format? Here is what we have come up with. We call them techtorials.
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- Development, CSV, techtorials
Bootstrapping tomorrow, today

Posted Feb 16, 2009 - 10:53 am

As a species, we generate some unconscionable amount of new digital data every day. The number is so big that no member of our species, that I know of, really has a good feel for the number. To try to wrap our heads around it we resort to desperate analogies e.g.
Debuggers Delight Syndrome

Posted Feb 09, 2009 - 01:05 pm

From time to time, my long suffering wife asks me what the heck I do all day and where all the techie problems that furrow my brow to a depth of 0.5 inches come from? It is a really good question and recently I have been expending some energies trying to figure it out.

May is...
Cloud Month

BY THE NUMBERS: Cloud computing

CAREER: Top cloud jobs

MANAGEMENT: Cost battle: Cloud computing vs. in-house IT

REVIEW: 4 killer cloud IDEs

DEVELOPMENT: When to use cloud platforms vs. dedicated servers

SLIDESHOW: Top 10 cloud tools for IT pros

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Spotify bests Google in music service smackdown: For now

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Mount Everest ice is melting away, researchers say

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Has Intel finally landed that elusive Atom deal?

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Linux commands: Newusers adds new users ... fast and furious!

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Is the Post-Windows Enterprise IT World Upon Us?

1 comment

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