Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times Tony Hsieh is C.E.O. of Zappos.com, the shoe seller that Amazon acquired last year. A core Zappos value, he says, is to “create fun and a little weirdness,” so he values individuality in hiring.
via www.nytimes.com
Interesting read on company culture
Posted at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
There are many reasons why a program doesn't scale well across multiple cores. Synchronization is often to blame, or it could be a saturated memory bus. In this article, I will concentrate on another concurrency hazard: false sharing.
Lesson: Understand what a cache line is. This is particularly important for runtime/vm developers; because the effect is multiplied by the users.
Posted at 11:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Rewind the clock to mid-2004. Around this time awareness about the looming “concurrency sea change” was rapidly growing industry-wide, and indeed within Microsoft an increasing number of people – myself included – began to focus on how the .NET Framework, CLR, and Visual C++ environments could better accommodate first class concurrent programming. Of course, our colleagues in MSR and researchers in the industry more generally had many years’ head start on us, in some cases dating back 3+decades. It is safe to say that there was no shortage of prior art to understand and learn from.
Joe describes his journey with software-transactional memory; it is long. Shall be interesting to read this in detail an compare to Clojure experience. I think the conclusion is that you need to have this in from the start; code cannot be retrofitted with STM.
Just like many other language features we want, the large body of code in existing platforms makes us reluctant to "do the right thing"...
Posted at 01:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
via www.tbray.org
Tim Bray writes about the new breed of enterprise-scale systems. This is a wakeup call to CIOs and CTOs who think a J2EE-strategy or .NET strategy has a future. You're fooling yourself.
Posted at 09:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
A few weeks ago I found to my surprise that I'd been granted four patents. This was all the more surprising because I'd only applied for three. The patents aren't mine, of course. They were assigned to Viaweb, and became Yahoo's when they bought us. But the news set me thinking about the question of software patents generally.
Patents are a hard problem. I've had to advise most of the startups we've funded about them, and despite years of experience I'm still not always sure I'm giving the right advice.
Good essay on software patent issues. This guy fundamentally believes in software patents, but says they are administered wrong. A world without patents would be a world with secrecy, hampering innovation. Perhaps he is right, but how do we fix it?
Posted at 09:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
NoSql Databases – Part 1 - Landscape
At Directi, we are taking a hard look at the way our applications need to store and retrieve data, and whether we really need to use a traditional RDBMS for all scenarios. This does not mean that we will eschew relational systems altogether. What it means is that we will use the best tool for the job – we will use non-relational options wherever needed and not throw everything at a relational database with a mindless one-size-fits-all approach.
This post covers the current landscape of the NoSQL space. In a subsequent post, I intend to cover in more detail the various problem areas addressed by NoSQL systems and the specific algorithms used.
Overview of NoSQL databases; what, and why. I think this is an important emerging area; it seems that all the startups doing web, who have the freedom to choose the right technology for the job often use these. Now, IS-shops with rigid J2EE or .NET policies will soon have to consider them too,
Must-read. Erlang people I talk to say nice things about Riak.
Posted at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
