tcarnell

After thought:

Tech Debt is NOT a badge of honour, it's the opposite, it says "we made an engineering decision so bad that we now have to spend time and effort fixing/changing things which adds ZERO business value".

100% agree.

JUST_DO_IT (add value, fast) <-----------------------------------> WHAT_THE_BOOK_SAYS (enterprise arch etc etc)

The BIG problem is the total misconception that:

JUST_DO_IT = bad engineering

WHAT_THE_BOOK_SAYS = good engineering

In reality, the quality of execution is independent of the development approach - you can make a complete mess of either approach, however, the WHAT_THE_BOOK_SAYS approach WILL cost you a LOT more time and money to discover your team has messed up it and WILL cost a lot more time and money to fix.

My experience is that, just as your product evolves & grows, your engineering strategy should evolve and grow. There's a good reason why fortune 500 companies will have enormous IT teams, using enterprise cloud technology... and there's a good reason why successful tech start-ups do the exact opposite.... but hopefully, the startup will become a fortune 500 company.

ah, sorry! I've not been here for years actually, I always remember people posting tech/startup positions, but fair enough - I wont do it again.

so Dont try to fix the problem, just limit the consequences.

this type of action is likely to have the exactly opposite effect.

oh, free burgers every Friday :-)

Just another one of my little web apps, some might find it useful or inspiring...

tom (APIHouse.com)

Why is 'email' not an option? Which is by FAR the most commonly used internal communication system - although I do NOT recommend it!

http://teamstinct.com/but-whats-wrong-with-email

Teamtinct.com - It is still in its early days, but works great.

(although I am glad NOT to see Dyson on the list for producing excessively expensive vacuum cleaners with little or no perceivable benefit

and Sony - because they just ARE an innovative company (the walkman/discman, betamax, minidisc, S/PDIF, bluray, professional broadcast and audio products.

Philips I've already mentioned, but companies like Toshiba give us lots of innovation with things like disc drives (I cant remember Starbucks ever developing a new type of fast, energy efficient storage media, although that did give us the 'mocha-choca-frappa-latte')

Or NASA for, well, especially 'Curiosity'

or Microsoft for the XBox 'Kinetic' system.

or Intel (whose modern power saving CPU's are probably inside almost everyone laptops?

or Toyota for making practical hybrid cars

PS: Although I enjoy Google products, they haven't 'invented' a single one. Search engines? Email? not exactly a Google innovation.

Another subjective list and a another misunderstanding of the word 'innovation'.

Where are Philips who are pioneering high efficiency LED lighting, or TomTom that gave us the first decent GPS for cars? or Ubuntu that gave the world its first decent free operating system? or eBay, still the leader in global re-cycling... and I'm sure there are loads of companies that make amazing scientific and medical innovations that I am unaware of.

Although just realised quite irritatingly that the local Web Storage is not shared across browsers - thus, you can not write data from Chrome then read it from Firefox - W3C, where are you when we need you!!!

Would also be handy to create a simple set of JMeter tests to ensure consistency across frameworks.

I would would be keen to run the test against Contentigo, but not very keen to do this for all the other frameworks! I would hope that if a good set of standard tests could be found, then the various vendors/project could run the tests themselves.

I am actively building 'TeamStinct.com' to solve team communication, and especially as a replacement for email.

http://teamstinct.com/

I would be happy if anybody is interested in helping with the project?

In essence, you can:

- create/organize your data in hierarchically (lists of lists)

- publish content at any point in the hierarchy

- share data with specific people at any point in the hierarchy

- generate QR codes for any point in the hierarchy for mobile/remote access.

It's an idea I have been playing with for years, but finally got around to turning it into something usable.

It's actually pretty good and I think the concept is unique.

Just a little tool I knocked up that I have found useful for downloading from and browsing URLs that may not be published or easy to find.

However, I think it might also be useful for generating arrays of data, unique test data and other purposes.

I'd love to hear what people think...

oh, and not forgetting of course:

- "'n' things every programmer should know'" - "why every programmer should learn [C|LISP|ASSEMBLY]"

And can we just have a new section for the zillions of new "essential" JavaScript frameworks "we must learn" that get built every week.

hmmm, has anybody studied reading patterns of people when reading from a screen? It may be possible to fairly accurately estimate the probability of a section of text being read.

For example if there are 6 comments on display at anyone time and they are on display (without scrolling away) for 2 minutes, one might arrive at a probability of how much of that page was read, and how much time was equally spent on previous/subsequent parts of the page.

Especially when factors like, people tend to scroll text to be at the top of the screen to read it, or like me, highlight text I am currently reading with the mouse. Using these factors, we might be able to know what is/isn't read...

before improving something, try to measure it first!

I have also pretty much given up on HackerNews now too. I used to love finding novel and interesting material from any subject.

Now I just see the same posts over and over again:

- "top 'n' mistakes starts-up make" - "best 'n' ways to ensure your start up will succeed" - "'n' qualities that make a good founder/entrepreneur." - "why my start-up failed: lessons learnt"

The content is rarely ground-breaking and rarely written by somebody of note.

And a more disturbing trend is as soon as somebody write/posts something interesting, there follows weeks/months of similar, non-original rehashed posts/articles.

I think point-scoring is an important factor - as soon as the posting stuff becomes a 'game' that can be 'won', somewhere the reason for it all is de-valued...

Or perhaps it's just too big now... the book "the story of eBay" gives an interesting insight to community growth...

wow - that must have taken a LOT of organising! And how do they know which website I'm going to visit next!?!

You could even implement raid striping! For extra security and store the 'stripes' in different filing cabinets!

Surely if you can use colour aswell you could store LOADS more data per A4 sheet than 80 Meg...

ok, so are you also saying that it is impossible for an attacker to intercept data from a standard HTTP request?

My next point being that if standard HTTP is also vulnerable to such attacks, why doesn't the browser display a warning on EVERY page, telling us that it can not verify the website identify? Thus, all things being equal, I would assume that unverified, but encrypted is still better for the user than unverified AND unencrypted.

...but I've probably misunderstood something fundamental here (as is often the case!)

http://www.startssl.com/ - fantastic, thanks!

yep, that is exactly what it sounds like!

good point. ok, I should probably think carefully before inventing a security standard 'on the fly'!

I guess I was thinking along the lines that I could add my site to a Google service (just like Analytics) and when people accessed my site (https), Chrome could talk directly to Google and confirm the site authenticity, same way CA's work I guess, but run as a free service.

But as noted in another comment, anything vendor specific would probably be a bad thing for the web.

yes, I picked on Chrome just because that's what I was using at the time, I am aware the problem probably exists on most browsers.