Firefox 12 was released last week. One of the main features the release sports is “totally silent updates,” following Chrome’s path of “web-based version numbers”1 and going out of the way to obscure this information. It will be interesting to see how this plays itself out. Firefox 10 took us into the land of “always 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
My first experience with release engineering was almost fifteen years ago: I did a stint with Netscape’s release engineering team for a summer. I know I didn’t quite get why at the time, but I was hooked immediately. My professional focus has been on build/release engineering ever since. At various times, it’s been a difficult 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
Launching a 350+-ton peice of metal-loaded-with-people-and-cargo is a bit of a technical feat, not entirely unlike shipping any reasonably complex piece of software. Boeing 737 airspeed indicatorsection of theprimary flight display That’s why those doing it day in and day out focus so much on procedures designed to increase the odds of repeatably successful Read More
I recently read FastCompany’s interview with John Lilly. I knew John from my time at Mozilla1, so it was interesting to hear him talk about the developments after my tenure at the Corporation. One thing he said stood out to me: [W]hen I was at Mozilla the activity I did mostly was to tell the Read More
An OH: When you make your users feel like this, you’re doing it wrong. When you’re driving your users toward something they don’t want such that they just go grab the “original” version of what they don’t want, you’re doing it wrong. And when you’re telling your users they’re wrong for wanting what they want, Read More
It was the quintessential Twit-versationTM. Mike Shaver tweeted a couple of weeks ago “you can make a surprising amount of stuff happen just by making people believe it’ll happen, and that it’ll be fun to make it so.” I replied—admittedly sarcastically—that he, “clearly [had] never been a build engineer.” Shaver corrected me, but didn’t address Read More