Posts

I don’t want to pick on this person, so I won’t use their name, but I saw this in a blog post today: The most common complaint people have when learning Haskell is the steep learning curve. It’s a very typical example of a mistake I see all the time, which is that when people say something has a steep learning curve, they mean that it’s difficult to learn. It’s understandable why people would think that way – steep things are difficult to climb. ...

At Etsy, our engineering is well known for practicing continuous deployment. For all of the talk in the industry about continuous deployment, I don’t think that its impact on personal productivity is fully understood. If you don’t work in a shop that does continuous deployment, you may assume that the core of it is that releases are not really planned. Code is pushed as soon as it’s finished, not according to some schedule, and that’s true, but there’s a much deeper truth at work. The real secret to the success of continuous deployment is that code is pushed before it’s done. ...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where data scientists should reside on an engineering team. You can often find them on the analytics team or on a dedicated data science team, but I think that the best place for them to be is working as closely with product teams as possible, especially if they have software engineering skills. Data scientists are, to me, essentially engineers with additional tools in the toolbox. When engineers work on a problem, they come up with engineering solutions that non-engineers may not see. They think of ways to make work more efficient with software. Data scientists do the same thing as engineers, but with data and mathematics. For example, they may see an opportunity to use a classifier where a regular software engineer may not. Or they may see a way to apply graph theory to efficiently solve a problem. ...

Etsy has gotten a lot of attention for its efforts to increase the gender diversity of its engineering team in the past year. The short version of the story is, Etsy made a concerted effort to recruit more female engineers, and made some changes to its hiring model that led to positive changes there. For more details, see First Round Capital’s coverage of a talk on how we did it by Kellan Elliot-McCrea, our CTO. ...

Everybody with a Web site or service occasionally has to put up a maintenance page. Maybe you’re doing database maintenance that requires downtime, maybe you had a hardware failure, maybe Amazon Web Services is having some kind of outage. You can either set up your application so that the page is displayed instead of what the customers expected to see, you can have a status page that shows whether the service is running, or you can redirect the user to the permanent URL where the maintenance page always lives. The latter approach is the wrong one. Here’s why. ...

Tim Bray wishes XML a happy 15th birthday: When XML was in­vented, it was the world’s only use­ful cross-plat­form cross-lan­guage cross-char­ac­ter-set cross-data­base data for­mat. Where by “use­ful” I mean, “came with a pretty good suite of free open-source tools to do the basic things you needed.” That’s why it ended up being used for all sorts of wildly-in­ap­pro­pri­ate things.

I generally find the way stocks are priced to be a joke, and press coverage of the stock market to be an even bigger joke. My favorite recent example is today’s New York Times’ Common Sense column, which talks about herd mentality in analysts rating Apple’s stock as a Strong Buy right up until the shares fell off a cliff recently. Notice the lack of coverage of Apple’s business fundamentals – the discussion is of the performance of the stock compared to the predictions. That’s topped off by extensive quoting of an analyst who did pick against Apple, without any kind of data-founded discussion of his performance overall. He was right about Apple’s recent share value, but we have no idea whether he’s right or wrong about anything else. ...

Last week’s New York Times included a book review of defense reporter Fred Kaplan’s book “The Insurgents,” which covers General David Petraeus, counterinsurgency doctrine, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It explains well how falling in love with your ideas can get in the way of success. Kaplan writes about how proponents of counterinsurgency doctrine in the military worked the media, defense scholars, and the defense establishment to replace the existing Cold War doctrine with their own ideas. Here’s how the reviewer, Thanassis Cambanis, describes their better days: ...

It seems like the recent trend has been toward publishing blogs without public comment sections. For one thing, people are sick of spam, Internet cranks, and the work required to have a comments section that adds to the site rather than detracting. As an example, here’s Matt Gemmell explaining why he turned off comments. At the same time, many writers are using static publishing engines or sites like Tumblr that don’t even support comments. (I know you can use third party commenting tools like Disqus, but most people don’t.) ...

Why are SQL injection vulnerabilities so prevalent? Because most of the PHP/MySQL documentation uses examples with SQL injection vulnerabilities and no discussion of the potential risks.