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Code's Worst Enemy
If you could snap your fingers and bring Perl 6 on Parrot's implementation up to the level of Rhino's, would you still choose JavaScript?
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 104 posts.
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Back to Basics
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi…
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Amazon's Dynamo
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the…
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Paul Buchheit: Is there more to life than money?
Whenever there is a discussion about joining a startup vs working at regular job, someone will defend the boring 9-5 job by saying, "there i...
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Objects Have Not Failed
Here is some practical evidence: According to the most recent 2002 North American Developer Survey by Evans Data Corporation, over half the developers surveyed are using Java. About 1/7 of developers surveyed are using C#. Roughly half of those also use Java, so the fraction of surveyed developers using one or both is…
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Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 2
This is part two of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. Part one appeared yesterday. After a few years in Redmond, Washington, during which I comple…
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Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 1
This is part one of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. The rest of the talk will be published tomorrow and Wednesday. I graduated with a B.S. in Co…
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Getting Real
The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
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PEP 8 – Style Guide for Python Code
This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution. Please see the companion informational PEP describing style guidelines for the C code in the C implementation of Python.
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Evidence Based Scheduling
Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce t…
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Women in Science
Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest…
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Hitting the High Notes
In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company: The common belief is that when you’re …
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Bell Labs and CSP Threads
This page is a slice of the history of concurrent programming, focusing on one particular lineage of Hoare's language of communicating sequential processes (CSP) [1] [1a] . Concurrent programming in this style is interesting for reasons not of efficiency but of clarity. That is, it is a widespread mistake to think…
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Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (…
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Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web (Marc Andreessen)
Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to
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taoyue.com: Why I Never Hire Brilliant Men
The article below appeared in the February 1924 issue of The American Magazine , a mass-circulation magazine that transmitted the popular culture of the day to the households of America. The magazine boasted on its cover “More than 2,000,000 Circulation,” — quite impressive for a nation whose population numbered 106…
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Good Software Takes Ten Years. Get Used To it.
Have a look at this little chart: [Source: Iris Associates] This is a chart showing the number of installed seats of the Lotus Notes workgroup software, from the time it was introduced in 1989 thro…
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Reddit lesson #3: fuck facebook, make real friends
I've already explained how fortunate we were to get that email from Kourosh back in Feb 2006, but I'm often asked how that email ever made ...
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YC: What No Means
Twice a year, Y Combinator has to say no to lots of people. Though we’ve done it 5 times already, it doesn’t seem to get any easier. Selecting a small number of investments from a much larger...
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Zero to Riding the Rails in Four Months
Whew! four months of nose-to-the-keyboard development work, and we launched our new product! Because it was the first time we designed, developed, and deployed a complete web application with our n…