Posts

We don’t see it much lately because the job market for software engineers is so robust right now, but there’s a real fear among engineers that H-1 B Visa holders are coming to take our jobs or at least lower our compensation. I thought it was worth highlighting this argument that the broad benefits outweigh the potential harms by a large degree: Consider the interests of every single American who isn’t a skilled engineer. The vast majority of private sector workers in the United States are engaged in local service provision. Maybe we’re in high status local service providing professions (doctors, architects) or maybe we’re in low status ones (retail clerks, maids) but it’s what American do. And clearly everyone involved in local service provision benefits if a new skilled worker earning an above-average salary moves to town. ...

Last week one of the data analysts at work asked me to help him out with a script he was writing. The script generates a CSV file and uploads it to an FTP server. He had one file containing a sequence of SQL queries, and another shell script that executes that script and then uploads the results via FTP. I thought it would be fun to write up what it took to convert those bits of code into something that meets the definition of production service in our environment. ...

Garret Vreeland on taking notes: Every day, I stuff more articles and links in there, in anticipation of the day when I’ll need to take advantage of them. Yet when I have an issue and need to find a solution, or I am looking for a reference … time and again I simply Google. I find myself in the same boat. I use Evernote mainly as a repository not for notes but for the weekly status reports I compose for work, and a couple of months ago I did go back and read through them all. I have 4674 bookmarks in Pinboard, and I don’t look at them all that often. It’s easier to just use a Web search. ...

Self-Reliance John Siracusa handicaps the players in the mobile industry based on their dependencies on other companies. This is an interesting basis for analysis that could be applied widely.

RSS with Newsbeuter “The Mutt of newsreaders.” Awesome.

Thoughts surrounding Google Reader’s demise Matt Haughey talks about RSS and news readers. I’m glad to say that I just renewed my annual subscription for NewsBlur, so as a news consumer, I’m not too affected by the impending demise of Google Reader. I do worry that the loss of Google Reader will reduce the readership of RSS feeds in general, and most of the readers of this blog still read it through RSS. I’d still write the blog if only ten people read it, but it’s nice to know people are reading it, or at least marking it read in their favorite reader. ...

A questioner on Quora asked whether Wikipedia has ever considered a redesign. In response, Wikpedia designer Brandon Harris, has written the clearest explanation I’ve read of the challenges involved in changing the design of a large scale Web site. If there’s one universal truth that I’ve absorbed more and more deeply with age, it’s that change never comes easy. Here’s one bit: How about languages? We support around 300 of them. That’s a scale problem that most people forget. I’ve seen several unsolicited redesigns that may look pretty but nearly all of them ignore (or worse, downplay) what is arguably the greatest feature of Wikipedia: that you can get it in your own language. If we want to change a text label (say, from “Password” to “Enter your password”) it will require hundreds of volunteers to check and localize that text. It’s a daunting task. ...

Under the Hood: Building out the infrastructure for Graph Search Really interesting post on the design of the search index used by Facebook’s Graph Search feature. How challenging was it to build? Facebook started the project in 2009 and migrated all their other search systems to it before building Graph Search. All three of the engineers listed as working on the project were at Google prior to working at Facebook. ...

Song lyrics sites are universally terrible. They are a usability nightmare, with bad markup and tons of ads. Here are some examples: songlyrics.com azlyrics.com lyricsfreak.com lyrics.com The markup is bad, there are ads everywhere, and the usability generally sucks. Why? I understand that running such a site exposes you to legal risk, and I’ve always assumed that the outlaw foundation of such sites explains their awfulness. Even so, I’m wondering how difficult it would be to make a better attempt. ...

Chris Parnin writes about problems with API documentation, as evidenced by developer migration to Stack Overflow. The whole thing is incredibly interesting, and points to a need for a major reconsideration of what makes for good documentation.