- Tools and Practices for Working Virtually — a detailed explanation of how the RedMonk team works virtually.
- Twitter Accounts for All Stack Overflow Users by Reputation (Brian Bondy) — superawesome list of clueful people.
- The Wonderful World of Early Computing — from bones to the ENIAC, some surprising and interesting historical computation devices. (via John D. Cook)
- Overlapping Experiment Infrastructure (PDF) — they can’t run just one test at a time, so they have infrastructure to comprehensively test all features against all features and in real time pull out statistical conclusions from the resulting data. (via Greg Linden)
"testing" entries
Don't put all your trust in mobile emulators
Steve Souders on how he reduces the development risks of mobile emulators.
Steve Souders, performance evangelist at Google, looks forward to the remote capabilities of debugging and testing, but he warns against putting too much faith in emulators.
How Netflix handles all those devices
Netflix's Matt McCarthy on building apps that work across platforms.
Matt McCarthy explains how WebKit and A/B testing play important roles on Netflix's many apps. Plus: Platform lessons Netflix has learned that apply to other developers and companies.
Process kills developer passion
Best practices sound good in isolation, but they can suck the life out of developers.
The software industry is now full of "best practices," and many of them make sense when considered in isolation. But when you lump them all on the backs of developers, you end up with dispirited bureaucrats/bean counters.
Four short links: 10 January 2011
Online Collaboration, Reputable Twitterers, Old Computers, and Web Experiments
Four short links: 5 January 2011
Cloud Checklist, Feedback Loops, Coverage Testing, and Un-national Services
- Multi-tenant SaaS Checklist — if you’re used to building single-site web apps, this is a simple overview of the differences when building multi-tenanted web apps. Nominally about Java, ending with a plug for its author’s product, but ignore all that and it’s still useful. (via Abhishek Tiwari on Twitter)
- Angel Investing: My First Three Years (Paul Buchheit) — interesting to see how it stacks up for him. What caught my eye was The more great YC companies there are, the more reasons there are for other smart founders to join YC–the clever feedback loop in YC, where graduates help the newbies, builds its quality and increases its first-mover advantage year after year. (via Hacker News)
- Coverstory — reports on coverage of unit tests in Xcode. (via Noah Gift on Delicious)
- A Musing About 2011 and an Un-National Generation (JP Rangaswami) — The emerging generations want to use services independent of location of “origin” and location of “delivery”. Attempts to create artificial scarcity (by holding on to dinosaur constructs like physical-location-driven identity) are being responded to by a whole slew of spoofing and anonymisation tools; as the law becomes more of an ass in this context, you can be sure that the tools will get better. Living in a country other than America brings this home.
iPod program helps school test scores
Oregon third graders' reading and math results benefit from iPod Touch access.
An iPod pilot program in an Oregon classroom lifted math and reading scores. Results from that single pilot inspired the Canby School District to provide iPod Touch access to all its third graders.
Four short links: 10 June 2010
Adventures in Digitization, DIY on TV, Copywrongs, and Web Testing
- Gallery: Digitizing the Past and Present at the Library of Congress (BoingBoing) — amazing pictures and stories about preserving and protecting the Library of Congress, it’s papery past and its pixellated future. We can’t afford any damage to anything,” said Eric Hansen, chief of the Preservation Research and Testing Division. “Never take a sample; be completely nondestructive. … We know there will be advances in technology and that current techniques will become outmoded.”
- Mark Frauenfelder on The Colbert Report — It’s great to see Make and DIY culture getting an articulate outing on national television, but I’m entranced by the useless device. Its motion is so emotionally evocative, I’d swear it exhibits shyness. Reminded me of EJ Park’s work.
- Copyright Elephant in the Middle of Glee — if the TV show Glee were real life, the characters would have racked up millions on penalties from their infringing actions. In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna’s original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue’s camcorder: up to $300,000). And let’s not forget the glee club’s many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a “preparation of a derivative work” of the original two songs’ compositions – an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.
- Sikuli — a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). (via liza on Twitter)