Posts

Myth-Busting the Looming War With Syria The basic case against bombing Syria. Read James Fallows as well.

What do you make as a manager? Marc Hedlund on the less immediately tangible but in many ways more rewarding products of being a manager. The difference between good jobs and bad jobs is the manager you report to, a lot of the time. Most people spend more time at work on any other single thing. As a manager, your responsibility is to make that time more fulfilling, enjoyable, and productive. I find it’s a good gig. ...

One of the rules of modern life is that you can’t choose your billionaires; they choose you. Paul Ford explains why Jeff Bezos would purchase the Washington Post

Glenn Greenwald’s partner was returning to Brazil by way of London when he was detained under a terrorism law. He was then questioned not about terrorist plots but about Greenwald’s reporting work and the electronic media he was carrying. In their attempts to squelch reporting about how terrorism laws are abused, the UK is demonstrating the typical form that abuse takes.

For those who grew up with the internet, the people they know online and the people they know offline are often one and the same. We interact all day on Facebook with friends we first met face-to-face, and we meet our Twitter followers for drinks. The internet is real life, and that’s all there is to it. Summer Anne Burton explains to the dim why cheating online is just cheating. ...

In response to my previous post on engineering culture, Bill Higgins asked in the comments: Recently I worked on a project with multiple sites, and one of our toughest problems was the vast cultural differences between the sites. As a trivial example, one of the sites was militant about test automation and another site barely paid lip service to it. So it seems like there is some happy medium between “multiple, incompatible cultures” and “monoculture”. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on where cultural homogeneity is helpful and where it is harmful. ...

I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Heart of Darkness this week, read by Kenneth Branagh. It’s fantastic. It also reminds me of some jobs I’ve had in the past. There’s a great passage in which Marlow requires rivets to repair a ship, but finds that none are available. This, in spite of the fact that the camp he left further upriver is drowning in them. That felt familiar. There’s also a famous passage involving a French warship that’s blindly firing its cannons into the jungles of Africa in hopes of hitting a native camp situated within. I’ve had that job as well. Hopefully I can help you avoid getting yourself into those situations. ...

Bruce Schneier considers Edward Snowden’s dead man’s switch, which will trigger the wide release of his trove of documents if he’s killed: I would be more worried that someone would kill me in order to get the documents released than I would be that someone would kill me to prevent the documents from being released. That’s the security mindset.

Last year I started working in the world of Big Data, and at the time, I didn’t know that “data science” and “data engineering” were separate things. At some point, I looked at what my team is working on and realized that the distinction between the two is important, and that the team is firmly entrenched in the data engineering camp. Data scientists get all the glory and attention, but without data engineering, there’s no way for data scientists to practice real science. I’ll talk more about this in another post. ...

Why code sharing sites are eliminating binary downloads Simon Phipps reports on a trend I wasn’t aware of – sites for code sharing like GitHub and Google Code eliminating binary downloads. The risk of malware distribution and hassles from the copyright industry are making it more trouble than it’s worth.