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7 posts

Software

Never pass up a chance to admit being wrong

I spent the better part of an hour today in a Slack discussion with coworkers about how to implement a feature ticket. We went back and forth, and fundamentally saw the issue two different ways. I didn't really see any way we could reconcile the two views. Either one of us or the other would have to just accept the opposite perspective to move forward. We kept drilling down into examples and use cases, and each of us found more reasons to justify our position. Eventually someone asked a questi … (Continued)

Craft vs Trade - Programming

I was having a conversation with a friend just starting out, later in life, on his journey as a software developer, and we were talking about code schools and college degrees. There seems to be a paradox, that some companies hire code school graduates and have success when others don't, while at the same time not all companies have success hiring junior developers straight out of college. So what determines success? One model that might explain this apparent paradox is that some programming is … (Continued)

Incentives Matter - Google and Dark Mode

In conversation with a friend today, he made a passing remark: How can Google's own emails look like crap when viewed in Gmail, on a Google phone, using Google's dark mode? I think there are three things at play here. The first is that Google isn't just one thing. It's thousands of groups, mostly working independently. Of course we know this, but it's easy to forget when we use the shorthand of talking about a vast multinational corporation as a single thing. The second thing is incen … (Continued)

Why do hackathons work?

Reading about Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both histories emphasize that part of the successful R&D formula is hiring the best minds you can, giving them resources, and then leaving them alone to follow their curiosity wherever it goes. (Expect that they produce something, but not what or when.) The closing chapters of "Range" by David Epstein echo this as well. Hyper-specialization is a trap. Great results in the lab can be achieved by recognizing promising people, bringing them into your lab, an … (Continued)

The world that C, Unix, and C++ Built

It is difficult to comprehend what modern computers would look like without Bell Labs. In some abstract way I was aware of this, but reading Kernighan's new Unix history/memoir really hit that home when he talked about Bjarne Stroustrup developing C++ while he too worked at Bell Labs. Stroupstrup's name and the fact that he invented C++ was lodged deep in my brain from my high school AP Computer Science class where it was just one of those factoids in the textbook that was bolded to indicate th … (Continued)

Gains in Computer Hardware

From Unix: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan As an example of how computing hardware has become cheaper and more powerful over the years, a 1978 PWB paper by Ted Dolotta and Mashey described the development environment, which supported over a thousand users: "By most measures, it is the largest known Unix installation in the world." It ran on a network of 7 PDP-11's with a total of 3.3 megabytes of primary memory and 2 gigabytes of disk. That's about one thousandth of a typical lapt … (Continued)

Troy Hunt on Scratching Your Own Itch

Troy Hunt is the creator of about Have I Been Pwned, his website that can tell you when your email or password is included in a data breach when a company gets hacked. It has become the biggest player in the market. Now, it's grown so large that he's having trouble managing as a one-man project and he's started looking for a company or non-profit to help take over managing it. On his weekly update podcast this week, he took a little time to recap the history of the project, starting at about 3: … (Continued)