Overheard in the tech blogosphere » Programming

Overheard talking about Node.js and JavaScript on the server

Margaret Rouse — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 11:44:24 +0000

“Node is a server-side JavaScript interpreter that changes the notion of how a server should work. Its goal is to enable a programmer to build highly-scalable applications and write code that handles tens of thousands of simultaneous connections on one, and only one, physical machine.” — Michael Abernethy

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is Node.js. Node.js is a set of server-side JavaScript libraries that runs within Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model. It is asynchronous, which proponents say leads to good performance and scalability. The most intruiging thing I’ve read about Node, though, is that if it becomes widely adopted on mobile devices, it has the potential to change the way we think about servers. Again.

Overheard – mobile browser

Margaret Rouse — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 18:17:44 +0000

If Google’s vice president of engineering is right, it means that many developers might be wasting time trying to port their application to various mobile platforms out there. Build for the mobile browser; it might not look like a very good idea now, but it could pay off in the future.

Stan Schroeder, Google: Browser is the Platform of the Future, Even on Mobiles

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is mobile browser.

Overheard – Pigs and chickens

Margaret Rouse — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:11:25 +0000

People who are not committed to the project and are not accountable for deliverables at the meeting do not get to talk. They are excess overhead for the meeting. They might be called eavesdroppers if you don’t like chickens. Whatever we call them it should have a negative connotation because they tend to sap productivity.

Jeff Sutherland, SCRUM: Pigs and Chickens

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is pigs and chickens.

Overheard: Google Chrome and the principle of least privilege

Margaret Rouse — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 13:12:31 +0000

The most important reason for limiting the security privileges your code requires to run is to reduce the damage that can occur should your code be exploited by a malicious user.

G Andrew Duthie, The Importance of the Principle of Least Privilege

Google Chrome uses the principle of least privilege. Each tab in Chrome is sandboxed (isolated) to prevent malware from installing itself or allowing what happens in one tab to affect what happens in another.

Overheard: Kent Beck, extreme programming and the quest for quality

Margaret Rouse — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:35:36 +0000

I think it’s a combination of technical and social factors that leads to all the defects in deployed software. Part of it is the attitude that software is just inherently unreliable, and customers are conditioned to accept that. Developers are conditioned to accept that. Testers are conditioned to accept that. We just decided it was like the weather and there’s nothing we could do about it, which isn’t a very responsible position because in fact, there’s a lot that software developers can do about it.

Kent Beck, as quoted in Extreme Programming inventor talks about agile development

Kent Beck gave a great interview that’s posted on the IBM developerWorks site, where he talks about the payroll project at Chrysler. It’s a great read.

Now, the payroll program would handle Chrysler’s entire payroll, representing 1/10 of 1 percent of the entire US gross national product — at that scale, with union rules and all the places they operate, it’s a complicated program. They had a crying business need; it had to work. At the same time, this wasn’t rocket science — we just had to execute.

So, after a couple of weeks I interviewed everyone one-on-one. I told the first guy that we’ll divide the project into three-week intervals called, say, iterations. In each iteration we’ll implement a few new features called stories. We’ll write down all the stories we need, slot them into the iterations, then do it.

I told the next guy [I interviewed] that we have these three-week iterations divided into stories. For each story we’ll write these, um, acceptance tests to demonstrate that the stories meet the customer’s expectations.

With each person I interviewed I added a little more. By the end of the day, I’d interviewed 20 people and had laid out Extreme Programming’s basics.

My favorite quote from the article? “Sucks less isn’t progress.”

Overheard: The father of object-oriented programming

Margaret Rouse — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:01:28 +0000

But just to show how stubbornly an idea can hang on, all through the seventies and eighties, there were many people who tried to get by with “Remote Procedure Call” instead of thinking about objects and messages.

Dr. Alan Kay (he coined the name OOP)

Doesn’t this quote remind you of Grace Hopper? She said: The most dangerous phrase in the language is, “We’ve always done it this way.”

If you want to learn more about the guy who “invented” object-oriented programming, Wikipedia has a good entry — but I absolutely love this video where he shares his ideas about how we learn. I HIGHLY recommend it. Apple should have a poster for Alan Kay. He thinks different(ly). My favorite quote of Dr. Kay’s is “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Overheard: Justin Gehtland and continuous integration

Margaret Rouse — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:10:38 +0000

All development teams (read: more than one programmer) have to deal with integration builds. This is where you pull together all the bits and pieces that the different team members were working on, and check to see if you have a fully functioning product or a Frankenstein’s monster.

Justin Gehtland, Continuous Integration with CruiseControl.NET and Draco.NET

Justin Gehtland is great teacher. (That’s my highest compliment!)

Overheard: Version control best practices

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 10:56:46 +0000

Many developers are sloppy about commenting their changes, and some may feel that commit messages are not needed. Either they consider the changes trivial, or they argue that you can just inspect the revision history to see what was changed. However, the revision history only shows what was actually changed, not what the programmer intended to do, or why the change was made.

Anders Sandvig, Best Practices for Version Control

Overheard: Microsoft gets a “D” in SOA

Margaret Rouse — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:20:43 +0000

Just what the world needs…yet another programming language. As soon as you say it’s aimed at non-developers, “real” developers will avoid it like the plague. And without “real” developer support, it’s dead in the water.

Fred Fredrickson, responding to Mary Jo Foley’s blog post Microsoft declares its modeling love with a new language, ‘D’

Overheard: Keystroke dynamics in two-factor authentication

Margaret Rouse — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:51:38 +0000

Nathan Harrington amended the GNOME Desktop Manager to include keystroke dynamics in the user verification process. When the user enters their username, the timings between key press events are measured and compared against a stored pattern.

Jason Striegel, Add keystroke user verification to Gnome

I think Nathan Harrington has one of the coolest jobs of anyone I know. He’s always putting something new out for people to tinker with.