The Third Bit

Steve Souders, author of High Performance Web Sites, is now teaching a course on the subject at Stanford. Guest lecturers are from Plaxo, Google, Netflix, and Yahoo; the class project is to improve the performance of a top-100 web site. *sigh* I’m jealous…

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Neat paper from Microsoft Research:

Networks and networked applications depend on several pieces of configuration information to operate correctly. Such information resides in routers, firewalls, and end hosts, among other places. Incorrect information, or misconfiguration, could interfere with the running of networked applications. This problem is particularly acute in consumer settings such as home networks, where there is a huge diversity of network elements and applications coupled with the absence of network administrators.

To address this problem, we present NetPrints, a system that leverages shared knowledge in a population of users to diagnose and resolve misconfigurations. Basically, if a user has a working network configuration for an application or has determined how to rectify a problem, we would like this knowledge to be made available automatically to another user who is experiencing the same problem.

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I can just barely remember lying on the living room floor watching the first moon landing on a little black and white TV. (Apparently, I turned to the adults who were clapping and crying and saying, “Is that it?”)  This picture was from the earlier Apollo 8 expedition, forty years ago today. I wonder what it will look like forty years from now?

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Via Simon Willison: Merb (the “other” Ruby-based third-generation web programming framework) is being merged into Ruby on Rails 3. What this means in practice is that users will be able to choose which ORM they want to use, which templating framework to write their pages in, etc.  Put another way, it means that every Rails app will potentially contain something you’re not familiar with.  Ironically, we chose Django over TurboGears precisely to avoid this…

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As I’ve mentioned several times, we’ve started rebuilding DrProject on top of Django. We had a post-mortem last Tuesday on our first term’s work, which Blake Winton was kind enough to summarize. The highlights (good and bad) are listed below.

Good

• Everybody gave more than expected/requested/paid for.
• The team produced some remarkably clean code in a very short time, especially given its prior lack of exposure to Django.
• Distributed collaboration worked much better than expected. (The team was spread across four universities in three countries.)
• The dev and commit mailing lists worked well, as did weekly status meetings on IRC.
• Regular, frequent, small commits went well/were a good idea.
• pyflakes and pep8 were great tools for checking code and style (but it would have been nice to have a script to run both on all files in one command).
• Code reviews rocked. (Author’s note: this was the best part of the term for me, and something I’m going to want to encourage in my undergrad software engineering class next term.)

Bad

• Tempers were strained occasionally during reviews and design discussions (more considerate language should have been used).
• Too much juggling people from one sub-project to another. (Author’s note: this was my fault.)
• svnmerge was a pain. (Author’s note: one developer was a real fan of distributed version control systems, and kept trying to move us in that direction. I should have resisted more strongly.)
• The project blog wasn’t used effectively—it was never clear what should go in the blog vs. on the mailing lists.
• People sometimes didn’t know what they should be working on. (Author’s note: also my fault—next term, the newcomers will be given a couple of short, specific tasks at the start to get them up to speed.)
• The release process kind of fell apart, the code freeze never really happened.

DrProject

The finalists for this year’s Jolt Awards have been announced.  Very pleased to see Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning on the list, along with Blueprint Requirements Center from Toronto-based Blueprint Software Systems, Komodo (from Vancouver’s ActiveState), and Rally Enterprise (in two categories).  The only disappointment is how few of the other entries I even recognize—my skills really are rusting away

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Via Carl Zimmer: the US National Academy of Sciences would like you to fill in a two-minute survey about what science topics you care about most. Current results are:

Software Carpentry

Google has decided not to launch its scientific data sharing service — another victim of the recession, I suppose.  Bummer

Software Carpentry

Interesting piece from Nature News: “Anyone submitting to a section of the journal RNA Biology will, in the future, be required to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. The journal will then peer review the page before publishing it in Wikipedia.”

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According to Google Analytics, my most popular blog posts are:

• Interviewing at Google
• Why Bad Software Exists
• The first public announcement of Beautiful Code

My recommended reading list (now somewhat out of date) and CV (ditto) are fourth and fifth in my personal popularity list.

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