Posts

Industry analyst James Governor takes a shot at creating a taxonomy of developers, with, I assume, people who work in developer relations in mind. I started thinking about how I classify developers, and boiled it down to positioning them on two scales. The first is vocation versus avocation. The second is inward focus versus outward focus. The first scale has to do with motivation. Does the programmer program because it’s their job, or because they enjoy developing software for its own sake? It’s helpful to know where your colleagues and potential hires lie on this scale, because it matters a great deal in terms of managing them. It can be difficult to motivate developers who are at the vocation end of the spectrum to learn new things or be experimental if you can’t show them in a tangible way how doing so will be better for their career. On the other hand, with developers who are at the avocation end of the spectrum to quit writing code and ship. When they pick an approach to solving problems, it’s often hard to determine whether they’ve chosen the best solution for the business or they’ve chosen the solution that intrigues them the most. ...

Internet funny man Rogers Cadenhead offers this sage piece of advice: If you sell your site to Yahoo, set aside 10% of the money so you can buy it back after Yahoo drives it into the toilet. In other news, you can already transfer your Delicious account from Yahoo to its new owners.

I have never started a company, but Chris Dixon’s paean to entrepreneurs makes me want to.

In Apple’s explanation of why they kept a log of locations where your phone had been, they also explain how they use crowd-sourcing to allow iPhones to rapidly ascertain their location: The iPhone is not logging your location. Rather, it’s maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location, some of which may be located more than one hundred miles away from your iPhone, to help your iPhone rapidly and accurately calculate its location when requested. Calculating a phone’s location using just GPS satellite data can take up to several minutes. iPhone can reduce this time to just a few seconds by using Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data to quickly find GPS satellites, and even triangulate its location using just Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data when GPS is not available (such as indoors or in basements). These calculations are performed live on the iPhone using a crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower data that is generated by tens of millions of iPhones sending the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers in an anonymous and encrypted form to Apple. ...

EveryBlock’s post-mortem on the Amazon Web Services outage that took down their site sets a standard of accountability and transparency that every engineering team should aspire to. Rather than blaming AWS for their downtime, Paul Smith explains that had they followed the architectural guidelines provided by AWS, they would have been fine. Nearly all potential outage scenarios can be mitigated given sufficient resources, but it rarely makes sense to build the infrastructure to avoid all of the known outage possibilities. It’s just too expensive and time consuming. What I respect is Paul Smith’s acknowledgement that it was those choices that resulted in the site’s downtime, rather than the problems with the AWS data center. ...

It’s a fun time of year for cable television as there are three shows I’m very interested in airing at the same time. Let’s start with my television obsession of 2010 – Treme. The second season premiered last night, and Nola.com already has their Treme explained post up, providing all of the local color that I so desperately crave. I also assume that NPR’s jazz blog, A Blog Supreme, will be recapping the show each week, as it did last year. Finally, HBO has launched its own Treme blog, written by the show’s story editor Lolis Eric Elie. Be sure to check out his reading list and viewing list. ...

The Washington Post today dives in to a question that I’ve wondered about almost since President Obama took office – what happened to the effort to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay? The reasons are as boring as you’d expect. Republicans thought they could gain a political advantage by fear-mongering about it. Congressional Democrats weren’t willing to stick their necks out to defend the President’s plan. The Obama administration started backing away from the issue as soon as it became a political risk. Now we’re at a point where both parties have essentially accepted that adhering to the Constitution is optional when it comes to terrorism, however politicians choose to define it. ...

Last week I mentioned that the only thing I was struggling with in my transition to Vim for editing code was juggling multiple open files at once. Switching from one file to another is really easy, especially if you’re working on a Rails app and using rails.vim. There are a number of really nice navigation features built in that make it easy to open any file from your project and to switch among related files. ...

Here’s how the Boston Globe describes the difference between a software engineer and a computer programmer: While software engineers develop the software, computer programmers convert the design into code that the computer can follow. That is, I believe, the definition of a distinction without a difference. The good news is that both jobs are on the paper’s list of ten least stressful careers.

I’ve been a vi user for many, many years. In fact, I used to program in C on a MUD using ed (vi is the fancy version of ed). However, it’s been a long time since I used vi as my editor of choice for development work. I use it for hacking scripts, editing files on servers, and general purpose text editing in a terminal window, but most of the time I use Eclipse for Java and TextMate for pretty much everything else. ...