Josh Kopelman: Nothing to Lose (or Risk Tolerance is a Competitive Weapon)
Interesting presentations from the 2009 Par Lab Boot Camp – Short Course on Parallel Programming:
(all links to pdf)
- David Patterson: A Parallel Revolution, Ready or Not
- Kurt Keutzer: Architecting Parallel Software with Patterns
- Efficient, Parallel Mobile Web Browser
When a Good Idea Works: Purity, openness, and simplicity are engines of design — on the language Processing.
pubsubhubbub: A simple, open, web-hook-based pubsub protocol & open source reference implementation.
The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine. The MP3 effect.
Avinash Kaushik: Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages
Daniel Pink: TED talk on motivation
How FlightCaster Squeezes Predictions from Flight Data.
Clay Shirky: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Chris Dixon: The worst time to join a startup is right after it gets initial VC financing
Bill Gurley: What Is Really Happening To The Venture Capital Industry?
The World’s Most Mind-Bending Language Has the Best Development Environment.
Paul Graham: “No, it turns out, we’re not even the protagonists: we’re just the latest model vehicle our genes have constructed to travel around in.” See Randomness.
David Foster Wallace on Life and Work.
Joel Spolsky: Strong problem-solving skills are important in business. Knowing which problems you absolutely must solve is even more important. Setting the Right Priorities.
Alex Wright: Sentiment Analysis Takes the Pulse of the Internet
Bokardo: No Sign-up Necessary (the strikethrough method)
Lessons Learned from Asia: Most Popular websites in China, Japan & Korea
Evri: Sentiment API Exposes Web’s Feelings
Millionths of a second can cost millions of dollars: A new way to track network delays
Energy-Aware Internet Routing
Software that tracks electricity prices could slash energy costs for big online businesses.
Jeff Jonas: Your Movements Speak for Themselves: Space-Time Travel Data is Analytic Super-Food!
BlackRock: Inside the trillionaires’ club.
Scott Locklin: A bestiary of algorithmic trading strategies.
Interesting startup: Fairspin. Perspectives from an entire community spectrum.
OpenTable: Technology that restaurateurs actually like.
Laws of Productivity: 8 productivity experiments you don’t need to repeat
Germany in the Era of Hyperinflation: Weimar Republic in the early 1920’s.
Interesting startup: I have been playing around with brizzly, a new service from thing labs to check my tweets. This has replaced twitter.com.
Startup to watch – Rockmelt: Marc Andreessen backs the new *browser* startup. Robert Churchill is another person involved with Rockmelt.
Chris Dixon: Why Seed Investors Don’t Like Convertible Notes. Interesting comment on hacker news from SV startup lawyer.
Nassim Taleb: Taking improbable events seriously.
Inflation and the Fall of the Roman Empire: Transcript of a speech given by Prof. Joseph Peden in 1984.
Tim Ferriss: Google Website Optimizer Case Study
Tim Sweeney, Founder of Epic Games: The End of the GPU Roadmap
Knob Creek bourbon ad embraces failure
Directed Edge: A Whiteboard Artifact
Dwight Merriman: Comparing Mongo DB and Couch DB
Jordan Hubbard: Mac OS X – From the server room to your room (pdf)
Joshua Bloch: How to Design a Good API and Why it Matters
I got a sneak peak at Peter Seibel’s long awaited Coders at Work. Superb book!
My familiarity with the folks being interviewed varied; some I knew well, some in passing and some I had never heard of — like Bernie Cosell & Dan Ingalls. All the interviews were great to read, some of them were absolutely fascinating!
The thing I liked about the book were how these legendary programmers went about learning their craft, what attracted them to the field, lessons they learnt and their thought process. Some parts of the book reminded me of Tracy Kidder’s The Soul Of A New Machine.
It was interesting to note the common things people agree on:
- Most folks don’t like C++, some really hate it!
- Many of them are not happy with the available programming languages
- The importance of reading good code
- Second System Syndrome
My favorite quotes from some of these interviews (you need to read the book to get the context):
- Jamie Zawinski: “One of the jokes we made at Netscape a lot was, “We’re absolutely 100 percent committed to quality. We’re going to ship the highest-quality product we can on March 31st.””
- Brad Fitzpatrick: “Everyone wants to do a web site where their favorite four web sites aren’t quite right and they want to make one that looks kind of like that.”
- Douglas Crockford: “One of the things I’ve been pushing is code reading. I think that is the most useful thing that a community of programmers can do for each other—spend time on a regular basis reading each other’s code.”
- Joshua Bloch: “But the fundamental rule is, write the code that uses the API before you write the code that implements it. ”
- Joe Armstrong: “Because the problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.”
- Brendan Eich: “I have this big allergy to ivory-tower design and design patterns. Peter Norvig, when he was at Harlequin, he did this paper about how design patterns are really just flaws in your programming language. Get a better programming language. He’s absolutely right.”
- Guy Steele: “And so I got to thinking that maybe for a really successful programming language, you need to design and plan for the social process as much as you design the technical features of the language and think about how those two things are going to interact. ”
- Fran Allen: “We installed some buttons on the computer, because you could do that, at that time and one was a panic button. When the program appeared to loop one could just push the panic button. ”
- Don Knuth: “But my third program was a program to play tic-tac-toe and that was what really made me a programmer.”
A note about the author: The questions are a good mix of general and specifics depending on the person. The fact that Peter had to speak to such a diverse field and ask great follow up questions says a lot about his interest and knowledge in this field.
I have been exchanging emails with Peter regarding interviewing the folks on his initial user-submitted list. In my opinion, there is an incredible amount of wisdom among the folks on that list, interviewing them and sharing those interviews would help the community at large as well as the craft of software development. If you have thoughts on interesting ways we can get that done, please add your comments.
Go ahead and buy the book. It’s a great read, well worth your time and money. There is an older book called Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers, some of those interviews are available on Susan’s blog.
This post on Hacker News.
