Infinite State

I’ve been playing around with GAE for a few days and come to a few early conclusions.

1. It’s very cool, very smart. The quality of the docs and examples is pretty good.
2. It’s all about locking you in to Google’s user and data APIs. In exchange, you get their (presumably) massively scalable platform. Your users really need Google accounts.
3. It’s fabulous for the Python lovers out there, and should help the language grow tremendously (which I think it deserves).
4. This is just the start of the new wave of hosted scalable platforms, and I’m sure there will be much more coming from Google, Amazon, and others.
5. I’d rather pay commodity prices and have complete control over data and advertising. Getting things free always worries me

I like the look of their datastore API, but I would prefer it if there were an open standard for entity persistence, instead of Amazon’s, or Google’s. I think the world is finally read for a post-RDBMS approach to massively scalable persistence of application data, but I’m not happy coding to a proprietary solution (yet).

For the past few years, I’ve had a slow-burning desire to own less. Certainly in the physical sense, I keep looking around me at the contents of bookshelves, boxes of papers, odds and ends and jars of spices I haven’t opened in a year. I am just not going to use that star anise. How about that bag of dried lotus roots Jonah brought back from Thailand sometime in the 90′s? Yikes. At one point, I even woke up in the night, scrawled some notes on a piece of paper and fell back asleep. In the morning I found:

• Get rid of 30% of everything
• If something hasn’t been used in 12 months, dump it
• If you find something that you weren’t able to locate when you needed it, dump it

I’ve had some success trying to act on these. My friend Geoff sent me this link to Paul Graham’s interesting essay on this topic. So I’ve started using Craigslist to unload things of value (guitar amplifier, color printer, etc.) and took at look at Freecycle but haven’t waded into it yet. I took a great Gibson ES335 down to be sold on consignment because I just never play it anymore. I’ve been giving things to my kids that I was holding onto for years, which they totally love and I won’t miss. It’s just hard to throw things out when they seem like they still have value to someone, somewhere. Anyone want a Sony Handycam from a few years back?