software development
If I told you to choose between two technical books, one by renowned Windows author Charles Petzold, and another by some guy you’ve probably never heard of, which one would you pick? That’s what I thought too. Until I sat down to read both of them. Take a
open source
Hugh MacLeod asks, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires? If Open Source software is free, then why bother spending money on Microsoft Partner stuff? I already know what Microsoft’s detractors will say: “There’s no reason whatsoever. $40 billion per year is
programming languages
The 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 roughly 1995 — 2001 during which stock markets in Western nations saw
programming languages
I ran across this blog entry while researching Microsoft’s new 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 up in disgust. What in the holy name of Scooby-Doo are those people thinking?
security
I picked up a free copy of 19 Deadly Sins of Software Security 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 booths. But I paged through it on the flight home,
software development concepts
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 with
lisp
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 stop
ruby on rails
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 is
programming languages
A reddit user recently invoked link necromancy on a 1994 Donald Knuth letter to the U.S. Patent Office: When I think of the computer programs I require daily to get my own work done, I cannot help but realize that none of them would exist today if software patents
usability
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 co-authors are
crowdsourcing
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 Turk, of
software development
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 See Farther: