The dot-com bubble [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble] was a watershed event for software developers. You simply couldn't work in the field without having something miraculous or catastrophic happen to you. Or both at once. > The "dot-com bubble" was a speculative bubble covering
I ran across this blog entry [http://mxdj.sys-con.com/read/363083.htm] while researching Microsoft's new Silverlight [http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/] Flash competitor. It makes some disturbing complaints about the limitations of Silverlight, in bold all-caps to boot: > This is where I threw my hands
I picked up a free copy of 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security [http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0072260858/codihorr-20] at a conference last year. I didn't expect the book to be good because it was a free giveaway item from one of the the vendor
Marc Hedlund offered some unique advice to web entrepreneurs last month: One of my favorite business model suggestions for [web] entrepreneurs is to find an old UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. To illustrate, Marc provides a list of UNIX commands
My previous entry, Twitter: Service vs. Platform, was widely misunderstood. I suppose I only have myself to blame, so I'll try to clarify with another example. Consider Reddit. The Reddit development team switched from Lisp to Python late in 2005: If Lisp is so great, why did we
Twitter is a victim of its own success. The site has massive scaling problems, to the tune of 11,000 pageviews per second. According to this interview with a Twitter developer, a lot of the scaling problems are attributable to Twitter's choice of platform: By various metrics Twitter
A reddit user recently invoked link necromancy on a 1994 Donald Knuth letter [http://www.pluto.it/files/meeting1999/atti/no-patents/brevetti/docs/knuth_letter_en.html] to the U.S. Patent Office: > When I think of the computer programs I require daily to get my own work done,
Jakob Nielsen's new book, Prioritizing Web Usability, is a worthy companion to the previous two. Now it's a trilogy: 1. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity (2000) 2. Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed (2002) 3. Prioritizing Web Usability (2006) You can tell Jakob and his
Amazon's Mechanical Turk Service is a clever reference to the famous chess-playing hoax device, The Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk dates back to 1770, and has quite a storied history. Read through the Wikipedia article if you have time; it's fascinating stuff. The secret of the
Electronic Arts is a lumbering corporate megalith today, pumping out yearly game franchise after yearly game franchise. It's easy to forget that EA was present at the very beginning of the computer game industry, innovating and blazing a trail for everyone to follow. Gamasutra's article We
There's something about the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) industry that I find highly distasteful. I've never quite been able to put my finger on it, until I read Rich Skrenta's pornographers vs. SEOs [http://www.skrenta.com/2007/04/early_adopter_pilotfish_pornog.html]
Although I prefer IE7's native speed and feel for day-to-day browsing chores, there's no doubt that Firefox is my primary web development IDE. Whenever I need to troubleshoot HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, I immediately reach for Firefox. That's primarily because of two incredibly powerful