December 2010
9 posts
“If someone sneezed where I grew up, there was no reason to say “God Bless you,”...”
– Forking Etiquette
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“Science seeks the truth. And it does not discriminate. For better or worse it...”
– Ricky Gervais
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(※) Cash Cows
Ron Burk sees Google’s 20% time as a waste of resources:
Cash cow disease arises when a public company has a small number of products that generate the lion’s share of profits, but lacks the discipline to return those profits to the shareholders. The disease can progress for years or even decades, simply because the cash cow products produce enough massive revenues to distract...
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WatchJacob Kaplan-Moss on DevOps at Boston Django Meetup 2010 (by PK Shiu)
DevOps is the ‘fall’ of IT. Developers are taking over more and more of the Operations aspects of many ventures, both as tools like Fabric become more prevalent, and as hardware disappears into a ‘cloud’ (of smoke?).
Probably a relic from my old days as a Linux nut, I’ve always found it rather...
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grad school, term 1
Things I’ve learned in grad school in my first 4 months:
LaTeX is excellent for writing papers. If for nothing else, bibliography management makes the most horrendous part of writing any paper a breeze. I setup a repo with a starter for USENIX-style (computer science) papers, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Most grad students doubt their choice of extended education, so they try...
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“C’s motto: who cares what it means? I just compile it!”
– Top 10 Ways to be Screwed by “C”
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(※) code aesthetic
There is a moment (~12:00) in DHH’s talk at RubyConf 2010 where he talks about the beauty of code from an aesthetic point of view (as opposed to, say, algorithmic cleverness) in a way that shows a very admirable and deep passion for programming. And while passion may not be needed to be a good developer, I find it hard to believe any greatness stems from the apathetic ones. Putting aside the...