Posts

Last week, Mike Loukides took a stab at defining DevOps over at O’Reilly. Until recently, I thought DevOps was just another buzzword, but I’ve changed my tune. The growing complexity of application infrastructure is the key factor in the transition of ops people into developers of another kind. Here’s Loukides: Operations doesn’t go away, it becomes part of the development. And rather than envision some sort of uber developer, who understands big data, web performance optimization, application middleware, and fault tolerance in a massively distributed environment, we need operations specialists on the development teams. The infrastructure doesn’t go away — it moves into the code; and the people responsible for the infrastructure, the system administrators and corporate IT groups, evolve so that they can write the code that maintains the infrastructure. Rather than being isolated, they need to cooperate and collaborate with the developers who create the applications. This is the movement informally known as “DevOps.” ...

You can probably imagine what the response of iFixit’s CEO was to the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display once he took it apart and found that it is probably the least user-serviceable laptop Apple has ever made. He hates it. What I like about his piece is that he doesn’t place the blame on Apple. Instead, he puts it on consumers: We have consistently voted for hardware that’s thinner rather than upgradeable. But we have to draw a line in the sand somewhere. Our purchasing decisions are telling Apple that we’re happy to buy computers and watch them die on schedule. When we choose a short-lived laptop over a more robust model that’s a quarter of an inch thicker, what does that say about our values? ...

I, like many people, thought that when Ron Johnson left his job running Apple’s retail operation to take over JC Penney, he’d turn things around completely. Not long after he took the job, he promised to completely remake the department store experience. One of the biggest experiments he tried was completely bucking the industry trend when it comes to pricing. In January, the New York Time ran an article explaining Johnson’s plan, which involved simplifying the pricing structure and eliminating most large sales and promotions relating to those sales. This sounded like a great idea to me. The idea of going into a store and buying things without wondering whether I could get a better discount later by gaming the system seemed like a relief. ...

Here’s an interesting definition of Big Data, from Douglas Patterson: One useful definition of big data — for those who, like us, don’t think it’s best to tie it to particular technologies — is that big data is data big enough to raise practical rather than merely theoretical concerns about the effectiveness of anonymization.

Today I was sort of idly thinking about the difference between a manager and a team leader. I suppose these terms mean different things in different organizations, but I think it makes sense to propose general definitions that clarify a somewhat hazy topic. We’ll assume that in both cases, the members of the team report to the manager or team leader, at least for the duration of the project that they’re working on. (If you work at a place where people have a manager and a team leader and the responsibilities are divided, all bets are off.) ...

Last week Bitly announced that they’re morphing from a URL shortening service into a bookmarking service. I actually don’t think this is a bad idea. Why do people start using URL shorteners? To share links that were unwieldy in the context in which they were to be used. I started using them in email because so many sites used URLs that were more than 80 characters long. It’s funny that with SEO and parameters used to track traffic sources, links are getting that long again. Anyway, that was the original use case. ...

If you, like me, are an old school online enthusiast, click on this link just to listen to the embedded audio file. It’s the sound of a modem dialing up a remote computer and connecting. Like Madrigal, of all the nostalgic sounds I can remember, that one is the most magical. The accompanying story is quite interesting as well, but it’s worth clicking for the audio file alone.

In March, Jason Kottke launched a redesign that included something that I had long looked down on – sharing buttons. He explained: I’ve always thought of kottke.org as a place where people come to find interesting things to read and look at, and design has always been crafted with that as the priority. A few months ago, I read an interview with Jonah Peretti about what BuzzFeed is up to and he said something that stuck with me: people don’t just come to BuzzFeed to look at things, they come to find stuff to share with their friends. As I thought about it, I realized that’s true of kottke.org as well…and I haven’t been doing a good enough job of making it easy for people to do. ...

When Twitter launched “new Twitter” in 2010, a lot of people decried it as a bad idea. The big change was sending every request to the site to one URL, which hosted a JavaScript application that requested the appropriate data and then converted it to HTML within the browser. Here’s Tim Bray explaining exactly why Twitter’s approach was wrongheaded. About a year ago, Twitter platform engineer Dan Webb wrote an article rejecting hash-bang as well, which made it pretty clear that Twitter would be moving away from this architecture. ...

Last week Noah Sussman gave a talk and said that developers should ideally program in an environment that resembles as closely as possible the environment they’d use if they were programming just for themselves, because that’s most likely to be the most productive approach. Usually, I start with something at least a little bit new every time I build a new application, because there’s something I want to learn. So I’ll try a new framework, or a new language, or a new something, just so that I can pick up some new skills in the process of building something. ...