Android Fragmentation Visualized
Great use of treemaps to show how hard developing for Android can be. See also This is What Developing for Android Looks Like.
Best Stack Overflow Comment Ever
ok I've kind of started drinking vodka so Im not too sure right now what your saying if you could elaborate a little I will look at it sober and I'm sure i'll get it.
Nerd Catnip
A consortium of billionaires start a company to launch privatized mining of the asteroids? NERD CATNIP!
Between Planetary Resources and SpaceX I feel like I'm living in a Robert Heinlein novel -- kooky space libertarians and all!
Best Buy is Doomed
Cringely:
Part of Best Buy’s problem is Information Technology. In Minneapolis, Best Buy is known as a body shop. While they have something like 1000 IT workers, most of them are temporary contractors. They come and go. The number of IT people who are Best Buy employees is very small. Too few to effectively set direction or do things well. Best Buy depends on an army of consulting firms to do its IT planning and projects. They do what they are asked to. Unfortunately there is a big disconnect between what the business really needs and what IT is doing. It is not the army of contractors’ fault. They can only do what they are instructed to do. Their suggestions and opinions are not welcome. There are too few real Best Buy employees with a vested interest in the business to give direction and provide leadership.
This is true.
It will be horrible for the Twin Cities if Best Buy goes under. I hope they get their act together.
PHP: a fractal of bad design - fuzzy notepad
An excellent summary of why I haven't touched PHP in a decade.
I had to stop reading because his criticism of PHP is like watching a mile long freight train crash into a mountain. It just keeps going and going. You have to look away.
Unloved Building in Goshen, N.Y., Prompts Debate on Modernism
Barry Bergdoll, the chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, said: “Brutalism was supposed to bring back all sorts of things like craft — the concrete wasn’t smooth, you could feel the hand of the worker there. But it was perceived in almost the exact opposite way. It’s one of the great public relations failures of all time. Most people think of Brutalist architecture literally — as aggressive, heavy, boding and forbidding.”
Maybe they shouldn't have named it "Brutalism"?
A Woman's Story
Reginald Braithwaite's mom was a programmer.
"I had it easy. The computer didn’t care that I was a woman or that I was black. Most women had it much harder."
Give it five minutes
Jason Fried:
There are two things in this world that take no skill: 1. Spending other people’s money and 2. Dismissing an idea.
Targeted Pull Requests
Thomas Ptacek, commenting on GitHub is My Resume:
A resume has just two purposes: first, to help you get an interview, and second, to get you past an HR hurdle....
More importantly: resumes, in any form, are bad at getting you interviews. A resume comes into play at the earliest part of the recruiting funnel, when the hiring team has the smallest number of cycles to spend on each candidate. Your primary strategy for dealing with recruiting funnels: jump the fucking line. It's never been easier to do this! Ten years ago, you'd have to track down someone who worked with someone who worked for someone at the same company as the hiring team. Today, in tech, you just go search Github for projects your hiring team contributes to and start sending pull requests.
I think this is really smart.
It's really hard to "work on open source". One usually requires a reason. I have a number of software projects on GitHub (as well as commits to others' projects) but primarily they were motivated by need. I needed a way to download email, so I maintained a project do that. Now, I don't need that any more, so it has stagnated.
But if you're trying to get a job at a company, contributing to the projects they use makes a lot of sense.