I've been an eBay user since 1999, and I still frequent eBay as both buyer and seller. In that time, eBay has transformed from a place where geeks sell broken laser pointers to each other, into a global marketplace where businesses sell anything and everything to customers. If you're looking for strange or obscure items, things almost nobody sells new any more, or grey market items for cheap, eBay is still not a bad place to look.

At least for me, eBay still basically works, after all these years. But one thing hasn't changed: the eBay website has always been difficult to use and navigate. They've updated the website recently to remove some of the more egregious cruft, but it's still way too complicated. I guess I had kind of accepted old, complex websites as the status quo, because I didn't realize how bad it had gotten until I compared the experience on the eBay website with the experience of the eBay apps for mobile and tablet.

I'm starting to resent Apps like I resented CD-ROMs.

I started playing this evil little game called Tiny Tower last week. It's effectively a Sim-Tower-heroin-clone-resource-management game. Every few hours I return to feed the beast make sure the little "Bitizens" are OK. Moving things, managing resources, restocking virtual shelves with new virtual goods. Mindless and addictive, but pointless.

You can find many good blog posts on what to name your tests. We present instead an appropriate strategy for when and how to think about test naming.

A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe for Brown's Ale, salvaged decades before from the wreckage of the old brewery--the very building where the Star-Spangled Banner was sewn in 1813. A student buys a sandwich called the Last American Pirate and unearths the long-forgotten tale of Edward Owens, who terrorized the Chesapeake Bay in the 1870s.

These stories have two things in common. They are all tailor-made for viral success on the internet. And they are all lies.

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies.
So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it?

In 2006, when he was 22, Mark Zuckerberg gave up writing computer code to focus on managing his rapidly growing startup. Like Jim Brown retiring from football at 29 or E.M. Forster abandoning the novel in his forties, the prodigy who programmed the very first version of Facebook was walking away from his transcendent talent. Or so it seemed. A few years later, Zuckerberg began setting annual tests of discipline for himself, vowing to wear a tie to work every day in 2009, learn Mandarin in 2010, and personally kill any animal he ate in 2011. Earlier this year, unbeknown to all but a few friends and co-workers, he gave himself a new challenge with unknown ramifications for what is soon to be Silicon Valley’s newest public company. Mark Zuckerberg pledged to return to his roots and spend time programming each day.

Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

Jeff Atwood wrote a post called Please Don't Learn to Code and Zed Shaw wrote a post called Please Don't Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer.

My wife lost her wedding ring down the drain. She freaked out and came running declaring that it was lost. Should we call a plumber?

I am not a plumber and I have no interest in being a plumber. While I advocate that folks try to be handy around the house, I choose to put a limit on how much I know about plumbing.

While my wife has an advanced degree in something I don't understand, she also, is not a plumber. As a user of plumbing she has an understandably narrow view of how it works. She turns on the water, a miracle happens, and water comes out of the tap. That water travels about 8 inches and then disappears into the drain never to be seen again. It's the mystery of plumbing as far as she is concerned.

I, on the other hand, have nearly double the understanding of plumbing, as my advanced knowledge extends to the curvey pipey thing under the sink. I think that's the technical term for it. After the curvey pipey thing the series of tubes goes into the wall, and that's where my knowledge ends.

Everything is a layer of abstraction over something else. I push a button on my Prius and the car starts. No need even for a key in the ignition. A hundred plus years of internal combustion abstracted away to a simple push button.

I'm going to give you a piece of advice when you're trying to learn something new: Never listen to people who try to make beginners feel like losers. For whatever reason, some people get off on making beginners feel like they're worthless for attempting something. Maybe it's because they feel threatened by new entrants, or maybe they were picked on as kids and this makes them feel powerful. Who knows, but generally if they're trying to make you feel like a loser because right now you're not that good at something, then just ignore them. They suck.

Currently, Jeff Attwood has a piece where he tells you to not learn to code. I wonder if he's going to tell his kids they shouldn't learn to code when they want to become just like Daddy? Probably not. He'll gleefully run over and show them how to code and tell them it's so much fun and that they should all do it and it's the best thing ever! But, of course, your kids shouldn't learn to code, and you shouldn't, and your friends shouldn't, just Jeff and his kids should.

Are you watching Mad Men? You have not been getting a truly balanced view of what it was like to be gay in advertising in that time period.

I was there, as a junior writer, then a senior writer, then a group head through the 1950s, and then a creative director in the 1960s. I went on to become one of the highest-paid creatives in the world through the '70s and '80s.

It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, because apps are the future. Wait! Apps are doomed because HTML5 is the future. I see something almost every day saying one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong.

The future of media on mobile devices isn't with applications but with the Web.

You know what? I’d love to write a column about the word meta. I could explain how meta started off as a prefix meaning “above or beyond” (the metaphysical realm is beyond the physical one) or “at a higher level of abstraction” (metalanguage is language used to describe other language). Then I could talk about how meta broke free as a standalone adjective to mean “consciously self-referential” and has become a perfect meta-commentary on the consciously self-referential age we live in. Maybe I could even start the column with an introduction about wanting to write about the word meta.

Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting the
story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks at a
conference. :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect the
guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make the
whole thing more entertaining.

While I was at the QCon conference in London a couple of months ago, it seemed that every talk included some snarky remarks about Object/Relational mapping (ORM) tools. I guess I should read the conference emails sent to speakers more carefully, doubtless there was something in there telling us all to heap scorn upon ORMs at least once every 45 minutes. But as you can tell, I want to push back a bit against this ORM hate - because I think a lot of it is unwarranted.

The charges against them can be summarized in that they are complex, and provide only a leaky abstraction over a relational data store. Their complexity implies a grueling learning curve and often systems using an ORM perform badly - often due to naive interactions with the underlying database.

Léo Apotheker's disastrous tenure as HP's CEO revealed a dysfunctional company struggling for direction after a decade of missteps and scandals. Can his replacement, Meg Whitman, fix the tech giant?

How dumb court decisions and bad laws have made it all but impossible for musicians to sample the way the Beastie Boys used to.

A lot of my consulting work lately has been around helping teams see software quality more holistically – that it’s not something only testers (or only developers) should be concerned about. Doing that I’ve started formulating an idea that isn’t fully baked yet – but it helped me explain things better – and I’d love your comments on this.

A lot of the confusion about software quality is that it means different things to different people, and the best definitions so far are zen-like, eg Weinberg’s ‘value to someone (who matters)’. They don’t describe things like technical code quality, which I intuitively know matters but doesn’t directly provide value.

When I was a kid, I had a morning routine with my family. Over breakfast, we’d divvy up the newspaper. I’d go straight for the Business section, and from there to the back pages with yesterday’s stock prices. Scanning down the lines of tiny text, I’d look for SUN, ORCL, MSFT, AAPL, SGI. Then back to the front of the Business section, reading whatever I possibly could about the silicon giants of the day. Then, finally, the funny pages. I was a weird kid.

Today, like many, I no longer get a physical newspaper. Most mornings I sit down with my iPad and pull up Techmeme, which more often than not leads me to several different “tech blogs” that deliver a mix of rumor, opinion, gossip, rehashed press releases, and, very occasionally, actual news.

There’s a striking difference between the technology news I grew up with and a lot of what I end up reading these days. The difference is something I only recently cemented for myself: most so-called tech news isn’t about technology at all anymore.

Every company comes up with the idea of writing a “shell app.” By replacing native code with a web view you could:

Release new functionality outside a full app update
Implement a feature once and share it across platforms
If you come from web development, you can stick to a familiar stack.
I reached out to great engineers to hear their experience with shell apps. Everyone told the same story.

At first things are easy. For simple screens, using a webview might be faster than writing a native implementation. As you add functionality to the webview, the complexity increases until you give up and write everything native.

One of common patterns of adopting Kanban is that teams start just with visualization and, for whatever reasons, resist applying Work In Progress limits at the very beginning. While, and let me stress it, resignation from introducing WIP limits means drawing most of improvement power out of the system I understand that many teams feel safe to start this way.

If you are in such point, or even a step earlier, when you’re just considering Kanban but haven’t yet started, and you are basically afraid of limits I have a challenge for you. Well, even if you use WIP I have the very same challenge.

First, think of limits you might want to have.

Java's checked exceptions were an experiment. While Java borrows most of its try/catch exception handling from C++, the notion of "checked" exceptions, which must either be caught or explicitly thrown, are a Java addition. By and large, this experiment has failed. You won't find checked exceptions in Java-influenced languages like Ruby or C#.

An idea (the idea?) behind C++ style exception handling is a sound one--it allows one to deal with exceptional conditions at an appropriate, perhaps centralized, point in the call stack, which may be far from where the exceptional condition was encountered. Unrecoverable exceptions are common at very low levels of the code--places where we're interacting with I/O and network devices, for example. But these are the very places least likely to know the appropriate response. Do we simply "skip" that action? Try again? Try a different service? Report the problem to the user? To syslog? Allowing the problem to "propagate up" to some caller is a convenient and relatively clean way of dealing with this problem of needing what is essentially out-of-band communication.

Jeff Bezos’ annual letter to Amazon shareholders is a timely manifesto, unifying the company’s expansive range of businesses, justifying its approach to established markets, and marking as a target anyone who stands in its way.

The letter, released Friday morning, begins with extensive quotes from customers praising Amazon Web Services, Fulfillment by Amazon and Kindle Direct Publishing. The unifying thread? All three platforms are “self-service.”

MY COLLEAGUE wrote a characteristically thoughtful post on the non-binarism of scientific and faith-based belief systems. As it happens, my piece in this week's paper is about Tennessee's newly enacted law protecting teachers "from discipline for teaching scientific subjects in an objective manner". I spent a large part of last week discussing this bill with scientists and civil-libertarians, many of whom see the bill as a Trojan horse for the teaching of creationism and intelligent design; with the bill's supporters in Tennessee's legislature, who seem genuinely amazed that the bill has stirred controversy; and with a representative from the Discovery Institute, whence the bill's inspiration came. In this battle generally—that is, in the battle over whether humans evolved through natural selection or were created ex nihilo by God a few millennia back, and in the battle over whether the latter theory has a place in science classrooms—I side with the first camp.

Imagine that you're crazy enough to think about building a search engine.  It's a huge task: the minimum index size needed to answer most queries is a few billion webpages. Crawling and indexing a few billion webpages requires a cluster with several petabytes of usable disk -- that's several thousand 1 terabyte disks -- and produces an index that's about 100 terabytes in size.

Serving query results quickly involves having most of the index in RAM or on solid state (flash) disk. If you can buy a server with 100 gigabytes of RAM for about $3,000, that's 1,000 servers at a capital cost of $3 million, plus about $1 million per year of server co-location cost (power/cooling/space.) The SSD alternative requires fewer servers, but serves a lot fewer queries per second, because SSDs are much slower than RAM.

They've become a part of the pop-culture landscape: sexy, private shots of celebrities (your Scarletts, your Milas) stolen from their phones and e-mail accounts. They're also the center of an entire stealth industry. For the man recently arrested in the biggest case yet, hacking also gave him access to a trove of Hollywood's seamiest secrets—who was sleeping together, who was closeted, who liked to sext. What the snoop didn't realize was that he was being watched, too.

This blog poses a rather radical premise. It suggests that Refactorings have counterparts called Transformations. Refactorings are simple operations that change the structure of code without changing it’s behavior. Transformations are simple operations that change the behavior of code. Transformations can be used as the sole means for passing the currently failing test in the red/green/refactor cycle. Transformations have a priority, or a preferred ordering, which if maintained, by the ordering of the tests, will prevent impasses, or long outages in the red/green/refactor cycle.

PRICE inflation remains relatively subdued in the rich world, even though central banks are busily printing money. But other types of inflation are rampant. This “panflation” needs to be recognised for the plague it has become.

I am widely credited as the inventor of the <blink> tag. For those of you who are relatively new to the Web, the <blink> tag is an HTML command that causes text to blink, and many, many people find its behavior to be extremely annoying. I won't deny the invention, but there is a bit more to the story than is widely known.

There are certain stories that begin in earnest only when they seem to reach an end. It turns out, I wrote one last year.

The story told of a friendship I had struck up with my New York doppelganger, a man who shared my name and whom I came to think of, with congenital self-absorption, as “the other” Alan Feuer. I had, for years, been getting Alan’s phone calls — from the Metropolitan Club, from well-mannered girls named Muffy — until one day, feeling curious and crowded, I looked up my double.

I've been working in the tech sector for over two decades now. That means I've had more bosses than I can remember. The ones who left an indelible impression in my brain were in the extremes: either great or horrible. There are many books written about how to be a great boss, for example Managing Humans. Today I'm going to take the contrarian position, and tell you how to be horrible at it.
Why is this useful? I don't know, perhaps you were such a great programmer that you were promoted. You reluctantly accepted your role as a manager, you hate it, and you want out. Of course you could figure it out with your superiors, but let's assume you're an introverted nerd with zero social skills :) Seriously, here is a list of things that would make you a horrible boss. Do not try these at work!

A quick review of the long and illustrious career of Facts reveals some of the world's most cherished absolutes: Gravity makes things fall down; 2 + 2 = 4; the sky is blue.

But for many, Facts' most memorable moments came in simple day-to-day realities, from a child's certainty of its mother's love to the comforting knowledge that a favorite television show would start promptly at 8 p.m.

Over the centuries, Facts became such a prevalent part of most people's lives that Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once said: "Facts are to the mind what food is to the body."

Let’s ignore the profundity and melody of those remarkable words, and focus instead on the formatting. I’d like to fit the entire address on a bookmark measuring 1.5" X 8". I’ll use a mono-font that fits 10 characters per inch. And I’ll leave 0.1" on the right and left. So I can fit 13 characters across each line. The text contains 237 words. How long do you think it would take you to manually break the address up into 13 character lines, breaking those lines at appropriate spaces?

The calculation isn’t difficult. If you spent one second per word determining whether or not that word is the appropriate break point for a line, it would take you just under five minutes to break the entire address up into lines that are 13 characters or less. And the odds are you’d do it perfectly.

So how long would it take you to write a program to do it?

In 1714, the British government offered a prize for a method of determining longitude at sea, with an award of £20,000 (three million pounds in today’s terms). John Harrison, a Yorkshire carpenter, worked on the project for several decades and eventually in 1761, came up with a design that proved accurate on a long voyage to Jamaica. The scientific establishment refused to believe that a Yorkshire carpenter could possibly have solved the problem that had stumped the best scientific minds. In 1773, when he was 80 years old, Harrison received a monetary award in the amount of £8,750 from Parliament for his achievements, but he never received the actual prize. A Yorkshire carpenter was the wrong person to have solved the problem.

Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding? Why is everything just static text?

Bret Victor hinted at the idea that we can do much better than we are now - we can provide instant feedback, we can show you how your changes affect a system. And I discovered he was right.

We can do better, and to that end, let me introduce you to

One of the great things about Twitter is working with so many talented folks who dream up and build incredible products day in and day out. Like many companies, we apply for patents on a bunch of these inventions. However, we also think a lot about how those patents may be used in the future; we sometimes worry that they may be used to impede the innovation of others. For that reason, we are publishing a draft of the Innovator’s Patent Agreement, which we informally call the “IPA”.

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

Dear daughter-

You should know that you are hated.

I’m not sure why they hate you. You didn’t do anything to them. You don your princess crown, take up your sword, and pretend at Pokemon. You read your books and you learn how to draw comics and dragons and you play piano and practice kung fu. You delight in pretty dresses and weaponry. You love me when I nurture you as a mom, train with you as a warrior, and play video games and card games with you.

This bothered Dennis Pastor (executive director of performance excellence for WellStar Health Systems) and Tim Herrick (global chief engineer at General Motors). While their businesses were fundamentally different--one a health care nonprofit, the other a manufacturer of automobiles--the two former colleagues would consult with one another from time to time, and they both found themselves in need of a practical approach to visualization.
“We discussed on a Friday afternoon our frustrations with some of our reports not showing us what we really needed to see,” Pastor writes Co.Design. “We came to the conclusion that our processes were three dimensional but our reports were only two dimensional. We needed to see them 3-D; hand sketches were exchanged over the weekend and within the following week, GM had the first Lego prototype in use.”

I’ve edited a monthly magazine for more than six years, and it’s a job that’s come with more frustration than reward. If there’s one thing I am grateful for — and it sure isn’t the pay — it’s that my work has allowed endless time to hone my craft to Louis Skolnick levels of grammar geekery.

As someone who slings red ink for a living, let me tell you: grammar is an ultra-micro component in the larger picture; it lies somewhere in the final steps of the editing trail; and as such it’s an overrated quasi-irrelevancy in the creative process, perpetuated into importance primarily by bitter nerds who accumulate tweed jackets and crippling inferiority complexes. But experience has also taught me that readers, for better or worse, will approach your work with a jaundiced eye and an itch to judge. While your grammar shouldn’t be a reflection of your creative powers or writing abilities, let’s face it — it usually is.

Below are 20 common grammar mistakes I see routinely, not only in editorial queries and submissions, but in print: in HR manuals, blogs, magazines, newspapers, trade journals, and even best selling novels. If it makes you feel any better, I’ve made each of these mistakes a hundred times, and I know some of the best authors in history have lived to see these very toadstools appear in print. Let's hope you can learn from some of their more famous mistakes.

This is the conundrum, but lately I’ve been thinking of a business plan that sounds like it could work. First you establish yourself as an “influencer” by posting a lot of noisy stuff on a blog and building an audience. Then you need to “monetize” your influence. You tell all the VCs in the Valley that you are starting an “angel fund,” and you ask each one to give you, say, $500,000. They go along because (a) $500,000 is pocket change to these guys — so small, in fact, that they don’t care if they lose every penny of it; and (b) you’re an influential hack and they don’t want to piss you off; and (c) they figure you can maybe write nice things about their portfolio companies, which would be especially useful if/when one of their portfolio companies gets caught up in some scandal; and (d) if any independent journalists write something critical about one of the VC’s portfolio companies, you can can use your influential personal blog to savagely attack those journalists and try to discredit them.

This is not the same. PHP is not merely awkward to use, or ill-suited for what I want, or suboptimal, or against my religion. I can tell you all manner of good things about languages I avoid, and all manner of bad things about languages I enjoy. Go on, ask! It makes for interesting conversation.

PHP is the lone exception. Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic. Every time I try to compile a list of PHP gripes, I get stuck in this depth-first search discovering more and more appalling trivia. (Hence, fractal.)

PHP is an embarrassment, a blight upon my craft. It’s so broken, but so lauded by every empowered amateur who’s yet to learn anything else, as to be maddening. It has paltry few redeeming qualities and I would prefer to forget it exists at all.

Sometime in the late 20th century a naked man bent over, spread his ass and took a picture. Eventually that picture, known as Goatse, became one of the most venerable memes in internet history. Who is this man, and how did his ass take over the internet?

The story of Goatse begins with a mustachioed, wiry man in his late forties who goes by the name "Kirk Johnson." Johnson is a prominent practitioner of extreme penetration, which is the extreme penetration community's term of art for sticking huge objects up your ass. For years, Johnson has been rumored to be the Goatse man, based on their similar frame, skills, and matching moles on both Goatse's and Johnson's ass.

Reader, I examined the moles. They match.

A few months ago I finished a new book, and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.''

I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book.

The license plate on Linus Torvalds’ Mercedes SLK convertible says it all. The frame running around the outside of the plate reads “Mr. Linux. King of Geeks.” But the plate itself says “Dad of 3.”

If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow — his favorite color — and so’s the Mercedes.

If you meet Linus Torvalds, he comes off as a mild-mannered, down-to-earth Finnish-American. He lives with his wife Tove, three kids, a cat, a dog, a snake, a goldfish, a bunny and a pet rat in a comfortable 6,000 square foot home just north of Portland’s tony Lake Oswego neighborhood. The house is yellow — his favorite color — and so’s the Mercedes.

It’s often dangerous to generalize, but under threat, I would say that Americans are more “down the line.” They don’t hide their hopes and fears. They applaud ambition and openly reward success. Brits are more comfortable with life’s losers. We embrace the underdog until it’s no longer the underdog.We like to bring authority down a peg or two. Just for the hell of it. Americans say, “have a nice day” whether they mean it or not. Brits are terrified to say this. We tell ourselves it’s because we don’t want to sound insincere but I think it might be for the opposite reason. We don’t want to celebrate anything too soon. Failure and disappointment lurk around every corner. This is due to our upbringing. Americans are brought up to believe they can be the next president of the United States. Brits are told, “it won’t happen for you.”

There’s a received wisdom in the U.K. that Americans don’t get irony. This is of course not true. But what is true is that they don’t use it all the time. It shows up in the smarter comedies but Americans don’t use it as much socially as Brits. We use it as liberally as prepositions in every day speech. We tease our friends. We use sarcasm as a shield and a weapon. We avoid sincerity until it’s absolutely necessary. We mercilessly take the piss out of people we like or dislike basically. And ourselves. This is very important. Our brashness and swagger is laden with equal portions of self-deprecation. This is our license to hand it out.

Scrum was designed, and refined for small teams working in a co-located space, willing to innovate and able to get working software out of the door in a rapid fashion. It is simple, elegant and has a proven track record in such environments. Sadly, too many people believe it is a cure-all for any software environment, and attempt to employ it without adaption in large, cumbersome organizations deeply infected with a command and control mindset, within companies where teams are distributed across cities and countries, and in non-software environments. This is like trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole. I believe force-fitting Scrum causes more damage than it offers repair.

This is not to say that the underlying principles of Scrum are not applicable widely. They are. The problem is that too many Scrum enthusiasts don’t actually understand what these principles are, or why they are important. Many managers, consultants, coaches and ScrumMasters focus on systems, processes, and practices—and worse, attempt to incorporate “Scrum” into their existing, very unScrum patterns of work, creating some weird, freakish chimera, fit for no purpose.

Using Scrum as a band-aid is going to fail. Always. Evidence shows that it has, time and time again. Compliance to brand names or prescribed systems always causes this kind of damage. People stop thinking for themselves, stop innovating and then get frustrated, indignant and resistant when things don’t go according to plan. Scrum is the new compliance. That is its tragedy.

Rather than trying to use Scrum as a magic bullet, it is advisable to treat it an an abstract class, a platonic ideal. Contained in the simple implementation of Scrum there exists a set of principles, which when abstracted out can be applied in a plethora of situations to create environments that foster engagement, creativity and true value.

We all see that Barcelona are brilliant. The only problem is understanding just how they do it. That’s where my friend Albert Capellas comes in. Whenever he and I run into each other somewhere in Europe, we talk about Barça. Not many people know the subject better. Capellas is now assistant manager at Vitesse Arnhem in Holland, but before that he was coordinator of Barcelona’s great youth academy, the Masia. He helped bring a boy named Sergio Busquets from a rough local neighbourhood to Barça. He trained Andres Iniesta and Victor Valdes in their youth teams. In all, Capellas worked nine years for his hometown club.

The story Richard Clarke spins has all the suspense of a postmodern geopolitical thriller. The tale involves a ghostly cyberworm created to attack the nuclear centrifuges of a rogue nation—which then escapes from the target country, replicating itself in thousands of computers throughout the world. It may be lurking in yours right now. Harmlessly inactive...or awaiting further orders.

A great story, right? In fact, the world-changing “weaponized malware” computer worm called Stuxnet is very real. It seems to have been launched in mid-2009, done terrific damage to Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 and then spread to computers all over the world. Stuxnet may have averted a nuclear conflagration by diminishing Israel’s perception of a need for an imminent attack on Iran. And yet it might end up starting one someday soon, if its replications are manipulated maliciously. And at the heart of the story is a mystery: Who made and launched Stuxnet in the first place?

Richard Clarke tells me he knows the answer.

The IT industry is either taking giant leaps ahead or it's in deep turmoil. On the one hand we're pushing forward, reinventing the way that we build software and striving for craftsmanship at every turn. On the other though, we're continually forgetting the good of the past and software teams are still screwing up on an alarmingly regular basis.

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it's frustratingly neglected by many teams. Whether performed by one person or shared amongst the team, the software architecture role exists on even the most agile of teams yet the balance of up front and evolutionary thinking often reflects aspiration rather than reality.

De enige oplossing die werkt, is als er met een heel grote klap een einde wordt gemaakt aan de hypotheekrenteaftrek, zonder dat mensen benadeeld worden. Dan herstelt de markt zich. Dat zegt René Tissen, hoogleraar Bedrijfskunde aan de Business Universiteit Nyenrode en RTLZ-columnist, in de special van het NVMagazine. Hierin komen vijftig prominente Nederlanders aan het woord over de woningmarkt.

I recently had a unique opportunity to visit Facebook headquarters and see that story in action. Facebook gave me an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the process it uses to deploy new functionality. I watched first-hand as the company's release engineers rolled out the new "timeline" feature for brand pages.

As I passed through the front entrance of the campus and onto the road that circles the buildings, I saw the name on a street sign: Hacker Way. As founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in an open letter to investors earlier this year when Facebook filed for its initial public offering, he also gave the name "The Hacker Way" to the company's management philosophy and development approach. During my two days at Facebook, I learned about the important role that release engineering has played in making The Hacker Way scale alongside the site's rapid growth in popularity.

In 1989, as communism was beginning to crumble across Eastern Europe, just a few months before protesters started pecking away at the Berlin Wall, the Japanese game-making giant Nintendo reached across the world to unleash upon America its own version of freedom. The new product was the Game Boy — a hand-held, battery-powered plastic slab that promised to set gamers loose, after all those decades of sweaty bondage, from the tyranny of rec rooms and pizza parlors and arcades.

In our move away from the waterfall way of building software, it's common for software teams to ask how much up front design they should be doing. Just enough is a good starting point but what exactly does that mean?

The recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “like an Etch A Sketch” has already become notorious. The comment seemed all too apt, an apparent admission by a campaign insider of two widely held suspicions about Mitt Romney: that he is a) utterly devoid of any ideological convictions and b) filled with aluminum powder.

Is software architecture a poorly done and frequently neglected aspect of software projects? That’s the position put forth in a recent blog post by Simon Brown, an independent consultant and founder of CodingTheArchitecture.com. Brown contends that miscast architects and a casual approach to architecture on agile projects have contributed to the poor state of the architecture discipline.

Disconnected, ivory tower architects continue to hurt the reputation of software architecture, according to Brown. Instead of working closely with development teams and designing a practical, thorough solution, many architects work independently from developers and hand off dense, high level specifications. When software architects fail to add direct value to a project, the result can be a marginalization of formal architecture work which leads to unprepared developers assuming responsibility for software design. Brown sees this as a major problem and thinks that agile projects have exacerbated the issue. He claims that agile projects often neglect solid architecture principles in the name of rapid delivery.

Georg Petschnigg throws his hands into the air as he traces thousands of years of human evolution that led us to develop the fragile wrists we need to use tools. Petschnigg locks his wrist into place and pretends to scribble on an imaginary piece of paper, in the process lamenting the user interfaces we've come to accept from computing platforms. "How do we get back to creating?" he asks. "Developing ideas began as just dragging a stick in the sand."

The popularization of the Scala programming language, noticeable by the abundance of opinions and criticism on blogs and social networks (like this one by Nikita Ivanov from GridGain and the popular Yammer case), greatly increased the amount of information about the language. However, the quality of such information often leaves much to be desired.

What do you get when you have Silicon Valley’s best and brightest sitting before you, elbow-to-elbow with Hollywood moguls, New York elite, and some incredibly cool Bostonians (along with a thousand other inspirational souls from around the world)? If you’re Rob Reid, you multiply wit with cynicism, divide by 5 minutes, and express it in a hilarity set normalized to π+1. Behold, ©opyright MathTM, the best short talk at TED 2012 as determined by yours truly. Video of his talk is now available thanks to our friends at TED. So you can fully appreciate it, allow us to give you some background.

We had been on a long journey but I couldn’t see it anywhere.

There's a stage in a product cycle where you know it’s going to ship. Where you can see the end. It's right there, sitting at the corner of Emerson St. and University Ave. Or maybe sipping coffee at Fraiche.

Oh, hello, it waves — there. In front of you. The End. (Or, An End.) And seeing this puts you in a special space that when you think about it — think about all the work that it took the team to get there, to bring that end so close — you are overwhelmed with a flood of emotions.

It was November 2011 when we arrived at that point. Soon there would be an app in the Apple iOS App Store — something representing the top slice of tremendous work. But that version 1.0 … how long would it last? How long before version 1.1 and 1.2? 2.0? Before we couldn’t even remember how 1.0 worked or what the path there looked like?

I became curious. What had we created?

THE Justice Department is building its case against Megaupload, the hugely popular file-sharing site that was indicted earlier this year on multiple counts of copyright infringement and related crimes. The company’s servers have been shut down, its assets seized and top employees arrested. And, as is usual in such cases, prosecutors and their allies in the music and movie industries have sought to invoke the language of “theft” and “stealing” to frame the prosecutions and, presumably, obtain the moral high ground.

IT IS sometimes claimed that the devil has all the best tunes. It is not true; America does. From the earliest western singers to the brashest of rap artists, American musicians have never been shy of singing about their homeland. Robert Johnson pined for his “Sweet Home Chicago”. Woody Guthrie (pictured) sang of a country which stretched “from the redwood forest to the gulf stream waters”. West Virginia is almost heaven and California is dreamed of. Georgia is on my mind and Compton is where one comes straight outta. The list is endless.

It is not the same with England. When one considers its huge influence on popular music, relatively few songs have been written about the country which spawned Merseybeat, Glamrock, 2 Tone and Britpop.

Eric Jackson, a fellow Forbes blogger I follow and find both funny and astute, wrote a really spot-on post last month about why top talent leaves large corporations. He offered ten reasons, all of which I agreed with – and all of which I’ve seen played out again and again, over the course of 25 years of coaching and consulting. The post was wildly popular – over 1.5 million views at this writing.

Here’s that rare Steve Jobs story, one that’s never been told, about the company that got away. Jobs had been tracking a young software developer named Drew Houston, who blasted his way onto Apple’s radar screen when he reverse-engineered Apple’s file system so that his startup’s logo, an unfolding box, appeared elegantly tucked inside. Not even an Apple SWAT team had been able to do that.

In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his Cupertino office. “I mean, Steve friggin’ Jobs,” remembers Houston, now 28. “How do you even prepare for that?” When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: “I know what you do.”

A high-impact cover story in Wired magazine in 2010 asserted in its title: “The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet.”1 Authors Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff argued that the World Wide Web was “in decline” and “apps” were in ascendance. This is not just a debate about technology use and which businesses will prevail. It involves different visions of the way that people will access information, learn, amuse themselves, and create material with others in the digital era.

One of my favorite ideas in the new wave of programming is the notion of minimal viable product. The thought is that you should spec and build the smallest kernel of your core idea, put it in the world and see how people react to it, then improve from there.

For drill bits and other tools, this makes perfect sense. Put it out there, get it used, improve it. The definition of "minimal" is obvious.

I have an idea I’ve been holding back for a while because I think it is wrong.  It’s just too general to be true, and the argument that I use for it is, well, a bit abstract, but I think there is something there.  Here it goes.

Object-orientation is better for the higher levels of a system, and functional programming is better for the lower levels.

Interesting idea, but how do we get there? 

A purple rooster sculpture made from recycled grape Fanta bottle labels. Clocks designed to hang in corners. Bauhaus posters from the 1920s. Hand-painted vintage typewriters. These are some of the carefully curated objects for sale on Fab.com, the fast-growing flash-deal site for designer goods. Launched out of a loft in New York City’s Garment District last June, Fab had sales of $20 million in its first six months and is on track to earn $100 million in 2012. “We owe our success to keeping it real, authenticity, being close to designers,” says Jason Goldberg, Fab’s chief executive officer. That, and “offering people objects and design products they wouldn’t find elsewhere. No knockoffs.”

Krijg je dit: dat Nederland anti-Europees doet, daar waren we zo’n beetje aan gewend – maar nu begint Europa ineens anti-Nederlands te doen. Heel naar. In een breed gesteunde resolutie noemde het Europees parlement het omstreden PVV-meldpunt buitenlanders verwerpelijk en discriminerend. Minister-president Mark Rutte werd opgeroepen het te veroordelen. Het Nederlandse kabinet „moet de ogen niet sluiten voor politieke ideeën van de PVV die haaks staan op Europese grondwaarde”.


Dit was niet de bedoeling. Van een boksbal verwacht je niet dat hij terugslaat.

A letter written by primary school student Flint, from Austin in Texas, has been hailed as the best thank you note of all time after he told a local weatherman who visited his school that he was 'more awesome' than a monkey, in a bacon tuxedo, riding a unicorn, on a space shuttle, heading for Mars.

Have you wondered why certain programs are located under /bin, or /sbin, or /usr/bin, or /usr/sbin?

For example, less command is located under /usr/bin directory. Why not /bin, or /sbin, or /usr/sbin? What is the different between all these directories?

In this article, let us review the Linux filesystem structures and understand the meaning of individual high-level directories.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.

While most of the tech world was partying at South by Southwest in Austin yesterday, Yahoo announced it was filing a lawsuit against Facebook for allegedly infringing on 10 patents from their 1,000+ patent warehouse.

I’m no fan of Facebook, but this is a deplorable move. It’s nothing less than extortion, expertly timed during the SEC-mandated quiet period before Facebook’s IPO. It’s an attack on invention and the hacker ethic.

I have Google’s blogsearch set to give me notifications about unit testing.  On an average week, I read dozens of blogs and mailing list discussions about the topic. Occasionally, I read something new, but there’s lot of repetition out there.  The same arguments crop up often.   Of all of them, though, there is one argument about unit testing which really bugs me because it rests on a flawed theory about testing and quality and sadly, it’s an argument that I fell for a long time ago and I’d like to lay it to rest.  Hopefully, this blog will help, but I have to relate a little history first.

Back in the very early 2000s, I had a conversation with Steve Freeman at a conference.  We were talking about Test-Driven Development and Steve had the strong feeling that most of the people who were practicing TDD at the time were doing it wrong - they'd missed something.

According to his official biographer, Steve Jobs went ballistic in January 2010 when he saw HTC's newest Android phones. "I want you to stop using our ideas in Android," Jobs reportedly told Eric Schmidt, then Google's CEO. Schmidt had already been forced to resign from Apple's board, partly due to increased smartphone competition between the two companies. Jobs then vowed to "spend every penny of Apple's $40 billion in the bank to right this wrong."

Jobs called Android a "stolen product," but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. The iPhone didn't emerge fully formed from Jobs's head. Rather, it represented the culmination of incremental innovation over decades—much of which occurred outside of Cupertino.

TODAY is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

Last week I ranted posted about how some members of the agile community are engaging in pointless debates about complexity theory, kanban maestros & scrum blockades. I pointed to a post by Liz Keogh as an archetype of the genre (as I said to Liz, there’s plenty of other authors I could have used). Liz asked for some feedback and was generous enough to agree that I had a point.

If we try to ignore the first commenter, who hilariously and spectacularly, misses the point by wondering if the issue is a “complex problem, possibly even chaotic”. I think Liz has drawn all the wrong conclusions, about the state of the industry.

The best bosses understand that their power comes not from maintaining control, but from devising ways to unleash more freedom, creativity, and contribution.

These photos are unreal. A protest in Bolivia demanding rights for the disabled turned violent yesterday as hundreds of people in wheelchairs and crutches clashed with riot police.

I sat in front of my laptop at work, watching the videos from the previous night. While logically I knew this was Star Wars Galaxies, I recognized nothing on the screen. It was like watching a completely different game. In that video, I saw the end to what could have been an amazing game, and I saw it end with a whimper. It was like a bloated corpse, already long dead and unaware of it. It was depressing.

In summer 2001, I started reading up on the upcoming game. It sounded awesome. We were still a long way from public betas, but I took a real interest in the online community which had already formed. We talked constantly, speculated, made suggestions, argued about how Jedi should work; we were two years from ever even playing and we already had deep and powerful opinions about a game that didn’t exist yet. It was unprecedented. Many of us had already played EQ or UO. We knew what we wanted. We all had a deep love for the source material. We fantasized about force lightning and saber throws. We wanted to fly the Kessel Run with Han Solo and Chewie. We imagined arguing bounties with Jabba, fighting Darth Vader. We wanted it all, and Sony knew it.