
Why Businesspeople Should Learn To Code (But Not Write Software)
The “everyone should learn how to code” meme has probably reached the point of absurdity. My favorite (humorous) example is the “Dear Miss Disruption” advice column, in which every question, no matter what the topic, concludes with the answer, “learn to code.” But my old professor Tom Eisenmann of HBS did something that few others […]

Distributed Coding Prefunc: Chicago Boss, Rails Based Erlang Power
Troy Howard and I sat down on a Friday night to do some straight up thrashing of Erlang and Chicago Boss. It seemed like a framework that has a lot of promise. Thus, we wanted to hack at it a bit and see what we could come up with. First things first, I running OS-X […]

On the Ethic of Delivery – Required Watching
Over the past few years I’ve been a kind of informal adviser to the Defrag event. The role is less than onerous, Eric Norlin totally understands what his participants (and at defrag, attendees really are participants and not simply an audience) most want to see. Defrag has always been a

Continuuity Launches Big Data Application Fabric–Warning: Buzzwords Abound
Coming out of stealth today at Strata and Hadoop World is Continuuity, a company that is looking to position itself within the PaaS landscape as it gives organizations the ability to build, deploy and scale big data apps. All of which sounds dangerously like buzzword heaven so it’s worth taking a look at what Continuuity […]

3scale Revamps Products, Goes Free and Jumps on a Bandwagon
A raft of product announcements coming through today from API enablement vendor 3scale. Some cosmetic, some pricing related and some all about improving adoption. All together they make a complete end-to-end API platform that can scale alongside growing organization. So what’s new in the release? 3scale Free Plan 3scale have

I’m Not Looking, But These Job Posts Just Suck
BEWARE: This is the beginning of a rant. If you’re temperamental it might piss you off. You’ve been warned, prepare to have a bit of rant with reality thrown on top for good measure. I’m not looking for another gig. I’m extremely happy with what I’m doing right now. The Russell Team I’m working with […]

Lessons Learned from Cloud Camp Seattle 2010
Last night I got to attend cloud camp, which is an “unevent” that people can attend to meet up with people who are looking into a particular technology for business. Cloud Camp Seattle was held at the Grand Hyatt Seattle, which provided an awesome environment to discuss cloud computing with 200 of like-minded people. For […]

Microsoft Azure Brings on Some Support for Open Source
As Azure gets closer to its release date of 01 January 2010 – the biggest question is what kind of support can you get for open source systems or programs like PHP. With AWS (Amazon Web Services) you can get Linux and native PHP support, and you can do the same with Rack Space Cloud […]

Our Programmers are not like Your Programmers
With apologies to Intel for usurping and corrupting their commercial tag line, in a classic “our rock stars are not like your rock stars” move, Stack Overflow (one of the best programming information web sites out there lately) has opened up a job board with a twist, employers will browse and beg you to work […]

Another New Startup for Seattle Starts Today
What is interesting about problems is that if you are lucky enough to have a good idea that will help solve the problem you can pretty much do a great startup. Over the last week my startup has been in trouble yet again, and in thinking through some of the problems with third party selling […]

Sequential Programming is Dead. But it May Just Mean Job Security :-)
Do you have a screaming-fast Quad-core computer? Does it really feel that fast? If not, it’s probably because most applications were not programmed to take advantage of the new architecture. In fact, if you ask the Intel guys, not even the next generation of programmers is well prepared: All major manufactures of CPUs, GPUs and […]