Quotations
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There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things
I can't say enough good things about Django. Professionally, it was one of the best technical decisions that I got to make early on at Tabblo.
There is a problem of managing identity across the internet, so when I say Darren Waters I mean this person and all of the manifestations and representations and personas of that person. The ability to knit those together is a huge challenge and opportunity for us as an industry.
Once people see that a pretty good phone can be a pretty good mobile computer, they won’t settle for less anymore; and mobile networks will be pried open.
[...] Silverlight has full access to the browser DOM and you can make calls from Javascript into silverlight code and from Silverlight into Javascript. This means that you can already write the presentation layer of a client side web app in Javascript and implement your business logic in IronPython.
If you write a spec, write a validator alongside. How much pain could have been spared with early versions of RSS if we'd had a common, agreed upon validator. In short, it's the test suite that ultimately decides the spec.
— Joe Heck
Now if WS-* technologies wants to own the niche of one proprietary platform technology talking to another in a homogeneous, closed environment...who cares? Good riddance I say. Just keep that shit off the Web.
Lacking a Strunk and White Elements of Style for URI namespace, we've made a mess of it. It's long past time to grow up and recognize the serious importance of principled design in this infinitely large namespace.
The web can eat toolchain bait like this for breakfast.
I'd like to ask readers of this site which you're more interested in, Sun's JavaFX or signing up for TissueWorld 2008, the Premiere Exhibition and Conference for the International Tissue Industry.
Just because Java was once aimed at a set-top box OS that didn't support multiple address spaces, and just because process creation in Windows used to be slow as a dog, doesn't mean that multiple processes (with judicious use of IPC) aren't a much better approach to writing apps for multi-CPU boxes than threads.
... Facebook has roughly 200 dedicated memcached servers in its production environment, plus a small number of others for development and so on. A few of those 200 are hot spares. They are all 16GB 4-core AMD64 boxes, just because that's where the price/performance sweet spot is for us right now.
People don't recognize how important URIs are. The notion that you have a huge, world-scale, information space, and that everything in it has an name and they're all just short strings that you can paint on the side of a bus; that's a new thing and a good thing.
— Tim Bray
There's a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.
I've always said that setting up a web site for most folks is scary and intimidating - but myspace, with all your friends there, lends itself to a helping culture. Everyone shares how to do whatever with their circles of friends... they get by with a little help from their friends.
I believe this tribe is, over time, growing farther away from the rest of the world. That's happening for an interesting and important reason, which is that the tools we are building and using are accelerating our ability to build and use more of these tools.
My "why move away from SGML?" reason is the way that every time I have to explain to someone that their Mozilla bug in invalid because HTML is actually an SGML application [...] I finish up by saying "if you want to see the actual spec that I've been told says that, you can buy a copy for 230 Swiss francs."
In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it's really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.
— Tim Bray
The promise [of J2EE] was that of infinite scalability based on tooling, which assumes that designing scalable systems is a general case problem. I now firmly believe that this is flawed reasoning. Frameworks don't solve scalability problems, design solves scalability problems.
We declined to participate in the XHTML2 Working Group because we think XHTML2 is not an appropriate technology for the web.
— Maciej Stachowiak, Apple
None of these scaling approaches are as fun and easy as developing for Rails. All the convenience methods and syntactical sugar that makes Rails such a pleasure for coders ends up being absolutely punishing, performance-wise.
— Alex Payne, Twitter
There are some ideas that are broken, but attractive enough to some people that they are doomed to be tried again and again. DRM is one of them.
Microsoft saw the danger of Javascript and tried to keep it broken for as long as they could. But eventually the open source world won, by producing Javascript libraries that grew over the brokenness of Explorer the way a tree grows over barbed wire.
If you're designing social media systems, you should be keeping an eye on the $2B industry that sells links from your site to their clients.
The problem is a lack of respect for the consumer. The manufacturers don't act as if the computer belongs to you. They act as if it is a billboard for restricted trial versions of software and ads for Web sites and services that they can sell to third-party companies who want you to buy these products.
Thankfully, because of the accountability that is built into the web itself (the URL structure is fundamentally accountable), I believe that while the vulnerability of the live web to spam is real, it is managable.
XSD is more flawed than most technologies that roam the earth. I was on the committee that created it, and that was back when I made my money explaining complicated technologies to people for money, and man, I could hear the cash registers ringing in my ears.
— Don Box
If you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and sales depends mostly on effort.
Most Apollo applications will likely be repurposed web pages running inside a specialized environment. [...] Imagine your heavy, always-open web apps leaving your browser tab and creating an application-like presence in your taskbar.
I just cut my thumb opening the clear plastic Fortress of Solitude in which you've packed the cordless presenter. [...] You forced me into stabbing your product with a carving knife. Is that really the sort of "initial user experience" you were hoping for?