I had dinner* with Dan Weinreb tonight, which makes this as good a time as any to write about his blog. At the opposite extreme from the last one I recommended, Jeremiah Owyang's, Dan's blog is very low volume. There's been less than one post per month since May, and in the most active and unique technical category – the one on Lisp – there are still only seven posts overall.
*At Daikanyama in Lexington, which has instantly become my second-favorite Japanese restaurant in Boston, behind only Oishii Sushi ... but I digress.
Dan was one of the better hackers of the 1980s, and among that group, he's one of the more articulate and personable. Symbolics was co-founded by a bunch of very smart guys from the MIT AI Lab, and of them, Dan is the one who was most often selected to explain things to me. He was one of the co-creators of the Common Lisp standard. He was the lead author on a paper that pretty much introduced message-passing. He was lead architect for ObjectStore, one of the major object-oriented database management systems. Now he's doing very interesting stuff for ITA Software. Along the way he's found the time to be the single best commenter – out of a very good group -- on my blog DBMS2, to be an active angel investor, to plan next year's major Lisp conference, and to take a very cool vacation around the Galapagos Islands.
That broad set of interests is reflected in a few, deeply thought-out posts on his blog. You're not going to find many posts that interest you on Dan's blog, for the simple reason that there aren't many posts overall. But chances are good you'll find some that open your mind to things you weren't aware of before, either in general subject matter, or else because of the depth with which Dan pursues them.
Blog name: Dan Weinreb's blog
URL: http://danweinreb.org/blog/
Editor/Author: Lisp and OODBMS pioneer Dan Weinreb, currently an architect at ITA Software
Archives go back to: October, 2007
Post frequency: As low as 1/month
Look and feel: Default WordPress (boring)
Topics: Eclectic, from Lisp and OO database technology to tech business history to book reviews
Strength: Deep analysis
Weakness: Eclectic choice of topics
This is part of a series highlighting blogs that may be of interest to NetworkWorld.com readers. A list of all the blogs covered may be found at the bottom of the introductory post to the series.