Category Archives: Uncategorized

Read this book: Linked

Albert-László Barabási’s book Linked: The New Science of Networks is probably one of the books that stand out from the ones I read in 2004.The author does a marvelous job of pointing out that many hubs we know of (including … Continue reading

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Distributed Systems are Hard

Working with distributed systems is hard. Many programmers who otherwise do a very good job writing application code do not fully grasp the challlenges of distributed computing.One of these challenges stems from having to deal with errors that you’d not … Continue reading

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CIO Got It Right…

My co-author Boris Lublinsky sent a link to an article titled The truth about SOA. It reminded me of several evaluation projects where I recommended that they don’t continue down the SOA path because they don’t need (or are not … Continue reading

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Sound Engineering and Premature Extrapolation

In a recent post Patrick Logan has a few pointers and quotes about Premature Extrapolation. Henry Petroski’s Design Paradigms: Case Histories of Error and Judgment in Engineering provides a similar perspective, albeit from an angle that has nothing to do … Continue reading

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Silicon Valley’s Secret Sauce

In his latest essay Paul Graham dissects what makes Silicon Valley “the” Silicon Valley. As someone who lived and worked in two (self proclaimed) Silicon Valley-like technology parks (the Silicon Alps and the Silicon Prairie) I found Graham’s discussion of … Continue reading

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Feature Extraction: From Web Searches to Genomics

On Monday 1/9 I heard on NPR’s Motley Fool Show that Google has started working with J. Craig Venter on a Personal Genome project (more about Craig and Celera Genomics in The Gene Wars). Where’s the connection, and what does … Continue reading

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John Vlissides

John Vlissides, one of the Gang of Four, passed away at the end of November. John had made significant contributions to the software patterns community as an author, series editor, speaker, and so on. I first met John at OOPSLA … Continue reading

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Google Era Interviewing

At the end of the 1990s companies like monster.com reshaped the hiring process–at least the first half of it. They changed the way people found job opportunities. They also changed the way companies found the people they were looking for. … Continue reading

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Ultimate Pair Programming

Pair programming represents one of the practices of agile software development. Traditionally the two developers work on the same physical workstation. This requires that they’re at the same location. During the last few months I paired with my colleague Grzegorz … Continue reading

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OOPSLA 2005

This year marked my 6th consecutive OOPSLA. Here are some of the things that stood out: Michael Jones demonstrated Google Earth in the Croquet workshop. He also gave a quick tour of Giga pixel photography. I found the latter very … Continue reading

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