Like most people, I have too many tabs floating around in my browser. I just finished reading a New York times commentary that’s a couple of months old now, but well worth the read; it’s called “The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies.” Some relevant quotations: I did some research and it seems most Read More
In the wake of the Asiana 214 accident, it’s been interesting to observe the differences in how the government media response, mainly through the NTSB, has changed since the last large-scale aviation accident in the United States, the Colgan 3407 crash. In short: the NTSB, largely via its Twitter feed, has been communicating directly with Read More
(Editor’s note: I don’t mean to be banging the drum on Git this week, but Mike Fiedler and I were talking about this yesterday, and I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, so…) I apparently have a bit of a reputation for being a “Git hater.” While I understand where it comes from, the Read More
Ok, so… maybe updating my just-over-a-year-old iPhone 4S to iOS 6 about a month or so ago didn’t “brick” it in the traditional tech gadget-sense of the word, but… it’s made the device often totally useless. When Google finally released their maps app, I decided it was worth trying iOS 6. The new Do Not Read More
Last week, Robert X. Cringely did a fascinating four-part series1,2,3,4 on IBM’s failing fortunes. It’s a great series of posts, and definitely worth your time, especially if you find you and your friends pondering the Old Guard’s tactical responses to current trends in our industry at cocktail parties5. Cringely references a quotation from an old Read More
Nathaniel Mott wrote an interesting piece on PandoDaily last week entitled Back-End Engineers Are the Unsung Heroes of the Tech Industry. He argues that “Designers and front-end developers get all the credit,” despite the fact that the rest of the engineers supporting that whiz-bang device consumers want also make important contributions and have serious impacts Read More
I finally had the chance to read the ars technica piece on Facebook’s release engineering team that’s been sitting in a tab since last week. Despite the article’s tone being a little… Charlie-in-Wonka’s-chocolate-factory-ish, it’s got a lot of interesting tidbits, and is worth the read. It’s especially interesting to see how Facebook’s unique engineering culture Read More
I’m still very much enjoying Robert Glass’ The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering1 I’m still making my way through it, but I wanted to call out a corollary to one of the facts he covers (which even he calls out as possibly controversial): An Australian colleague, Steve Jenkin, suggested to me his view of Read More
Major media outlets have started picking up Google’s news today that they’d be aggregating user profile and usage data across all of their products. To be honest, I didn’t find this particularly surprising since I assumed Google had long been doing this. But the winning quotation from the press release was this nugget: Our recently Read More