Programmer’s Paradox

“The urgent can drown out the important,” she said. “It’s great we did these urgent, expedient search indices, but what we really need to do is put them on the same page.”
- quote from Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience at Google.
Emphasis added is my own.  Replace search indices with any [...]

Divide and Conquer.
It was while reading the Thrift white paper, and seeing this line in the conclusion that the connection hit me:
Thrift has enabled Facebook to build scalable backend services efficiently by enabling engineers to divide and conquer.
That’s exactly the point of all the various agile methodologies: enable a team to divide up the project [...]

Let’s pick on Paul Graham for a bit, both because he’s famous and because if I drop his name it might lead to a spike in traffic to my blog.  Maybe.  I am under no delusion that something like that might actually happen.
Paul recently published an essay, Disconnecting Distraction, in which he speaks of the [...]

Today I happened to be looking into random number generators in PHP (and discovering they aren’t very good).  In my quest I discovered two random number algorithms I didn’t know about.  Not that I know a lot about random number algorithms, but these two seemed interesting and worth looking at, even if I’ll never need [...]

Eric Sink has an interesting blog post about an experience he went through in his career where his manager showed incredible trust in him and everything turned out well.  It’s a story I wish more managers would read, but those who are likely to discover it have already learned the lesson and those who could [...]