About

Hi.

I’m John Eckman, and I write this blog.

I work for Optaros, as the director of the Next Generation Internet practice.

What’s the Next Generation Internet?

It’s our way of describing applications which take advantage of:

• Web 2.0, the architecture of participation, the read-write web, community, transparency, and interaction (also known as “the web”)
• Rich Interface Application development approaches, including Ajax and Flash
• Modularity via Services Oriented Architectures (SOA), mash-ups, and other “loosely coupled” approaches

Optaros assembles Next Generation Internet (NGI) applications from open source components to solve client business problems.

Why is this blog called Open Parenthesis?

It’s meant to bring together two key concepts that have dominated my professional career - writing and coding:

1. Parentheses in writing are often used to insert explanatory text not directly related to the main point (see the wikipedia entry). (I did a PhD in literature & culture, and spent years teaching in a university English enviroment).

2. Parentheses in software development are used for a variety of reasons in different languages, but often they’re used to pass parameters to functions (or ti indicate the parameters a function receives). (I’ve spent the last decade working in software development, specifically on the web).

The site’s called “Open Parenthesis” (the singular of parentheses) because the idea is that the conversation is open ended.

It starts an explanatory insertion (like this one), but it can’t yet be closed.

It resembles a function taking parameters, but we can’t yet close the parentheses because we don’t know yet what the possibilities are.

Finally, there’s also the notion of “Open” because I’m focused on open source software, as well as open-ness and transparency of conversation in general.

Thanks for reading - please feel free to leave comments or email me at eckman.john AT gmail.com