Posts

For those of you keeping track of the trend of applications moving from SQL databases to dumber forms of storage, Twitter has decided to move to Cassandra. Seems like a logical decision for them.

James Fallows on the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report on the torture memos written by John Yoo and Jay Bybee: My point now is not to go through the A-bomb debate. It is to say that anyone who is serious in endorsing the A-bomb decision has to have fully faced the consequences. This is why John Hersey’s Hiroshima was requisite basic knowledge for anyone arguing for or against the use of the bomb. The OPR report is essentially this era’s Hiroshima. As Hersey’s book does, it makes us confront what was done in our name – “our” meaning the citizens of the United States. ...

I am strongly in favor of the correction of misperceptions. Here are a few links to that end: Latino immigration seems to lower crime rates, not raise them, especially violent crime rates. Los Angeles (50% Hispanic) and Portland (America’s whitest city) have roughly the same violent crime rates. Just because the Justice Department rejected a finding of misconduct doesn’t mean that the findings in the torture memos were sound legal advice. They weren’t sanctioned because the standards for what constitutes misconduct are incredibly permissive. Jay Bybee is let off the hook because he was a middle man, and John Yoo is let off the hook because he sincerely believes his crazy theories on Presidential power. The IPCC report on climate change was not rife with errors. There are no circumstances under which it is better to eat a 100 calorie pack of Twinkie Bites instead of an apple.

Github developer Scott Chacon describes their development process: At GitHub we don’t have a project tracker or todo list – we just all work on whatever is most interesting to us. No standup meetings, burndown charts or points to assign. No chickens or pigs. It’s sort of the open source software style of business – everyone itches thier own scratch. Inexplicably, it works really well and keeps everyone engaged, new features appearing quickly and bugs fixed rather fast. No managers, directors, PMs or departments – and it’s the most agile, focused and efficient team I’ve ever worked with. Maybe we should write a book about it. ...

I can’t believe I’m linking to Valleywag, but there it is. They have a recap of Steve Jobs’ iPod demo for editors at the Wall Street Journal. I agree with the many people who argue that Apple’s feud with Adobe over including Flash on mobile devices is mostly about control. Apple does not want people developing applications for the iPhone on a proprietary platform that will be ported to other platforms. I suspect that part of this is a pure power play, and that part of it is that they want iPhone applications to look like other iPhone applications, rather than looking like whatever UI toolkit the platform provider offers. My point here is that Apple has reasons both user-centered and selfish for keeping Flash off the iPhone. ...

Here’s an important article on employee motivation I saw on Hacker News: The great majority of employees are quite enthusiastic when they start a new job. But in about 85 percent of companies, our research finds, employees’ morale sharply declines after their first six months—and continues to deteriorate for years afterward. That finding is based on surveys of about 1.2 million employees at 52 primarily Fortune 1000 companies from 2001 through 2004, conducted by Sirota Survey Intelligence (Purchase, New York). ...

The theory is that if all the User-Agent providers implement all these algorithms exactly as specified, complete interoperability will be achieved and people who build Web applications need no longer concern themselves with the differences between User Agents. Which would of course be wonderful. Will it work? Nobody knows; it’s a science experiment. Just because nobody has ever succeeded in specifying a workable networked object model doesn’t mean this project will likewise fail. But it does mean that when considering the future of HTML5, we should recognize that this is a very hard problem, and there’s no guarantee that that part of it will come off. ...

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been completely entranced by Roger Ebert’s writing on the Web. Like most people, I thought of him as a movie critic, albeit a very fine one. He has long been known to me as a true student of film, and I appreciate his taste in movies. A couple of years ago he started posting about other things on his blog, and the quality of writing and of thinking I’ve found there has just astounded me. The fact that he has so sincerely gone further and built a real community with the people who comment on his blog has been incredible as well. ...

Jim Bumgardner explains how he used the command line tool curl and a bit of clever thinking to cheat at foursquare on a massive scale: At some point last week, I devolved into a 12 year old hacker, and I spent many spare hours (and my computer’s spare cycles) abusing the system with a set of scripts operating fake accounts. Not only did I add new venues like the North Pole, but I started persistently checking into coveted landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty. ...

I’m often thinking about what qualities make for a good software developer. One attribute that I think may be important is the capacity to keep the details of a large system in your head. What I mean is, the ability when someone brings up a new feature, to quickly know exactly how it should be implement in the context of the existing system. Or, to be able to recall where the code is in the system that performs some function that needs to be added to some other part of the system. These days, between search tools and the code navigation capabilities built into the better development tools, there are lots of ways to find things in a large body of code, but I think that having a mental map of a system remains valuable. I also think that having this ability may signify the presence other valuable traits that a developer should possess. After all, it’s not fundamentally different from having a good working knowledge of the Java collections framework or the popular Ruby gems or the massive number of PHP string functions. ...