Ok, so… maybe updating my just-over-a-year-old iPhone 4S to iOS 6 about a month or so ago didn’t “brick” it in the traditional tech gadget-sense of the word, but… it’s made the device often totally useless. When Google finally released their maps app, I decided it was worth trying iOS 6. The new Do Not Read More
Last week, Robert X. Cringely did a fascinating four-part series1,2,3,4 on IBM’s failing fortunes. It’s a great series of posts, and definitely worth your time, especially if you find you and your friends pondering the Old Guard’s tactical responses to current trends in our industry at cocktail parties5. Cringely references a quotation from an old Read More
Nathaniel Mott wrote an interesting piece on PandoDaily last week entitled Back-End Engineers Are the Unsung Heroes of the Tech Industry. He argues that “Designers and front-end developers get all the credit,” despite the fact that the rest of the engineers supporting that whiz-bang device consumers want also make important contributions and have serious impacts Read More
I finally had the chance to read the ars technica piece on Facebook’s release engineering team that’s been sitting in a tab since last week. Despite the article’s tone being a little… Charlie-in-Wonka’s-chocolate-factory-ish, it’s got a lot of interesting tidbits, and is worth the read. It’s especially interesting to see how Facebook’s unique engineering culture Read More
I’m still very much enjoying Robert Glass’ The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering1 I’m still making my way through it, but I wanted to call out a corollary to one of the facts he covers (which even he calls out as possibly controversial): An Australian colleague, Steve Jenkin, suggested to me his view of Read More
Major media outlets have started picking up Google’s news today that they’d be aggregating user profile and usage data across all of their products. To be honest, I didn’t find this particularly surprising since I assumed Google had long been doing this. But the winning quotation from the press release was this nugget: Our recently Read More