“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]