Category Archives: Coding, Software Engineering, Computer Science

“In the Shadow of the CMS”

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Kyle Chayka, in The Nation, shares a piece chronicling how content management systems shape current media now and in the futureIt’s an interesting, thoughtful read.

CMSs are like digital printing presses: They determine how journalism gets published online. But unlike the printing press, CMSs also increasingly influence not just how stories look but how they are produced, discovered, read, and monetized. To attempt another comparison: If an article is like a bag of chips for the consumer, then a CMS is like the vending machine. CMSs shape every media company from top to bottom, publisher to reader.


50 years ago Doug Engelbart and team demoed the future

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thedemoat50.org/

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s groundbreaking 1968 Demo – also known as “The Mother of All Demos.”

It was there at the 1968 Fall Joint Computer Conference that Doug and his team at SRI first presented their seminal work in personal and collaborative computing to the world – this was the debut of the mouse, windows, hypermedia, file sharing, teleconferencing, and much, much more.

So much of SRI vision has come to pass, so much has yet to be realized. I wonder what comes next, and who is working towards it?

If you have yet to see this, take the time out of your week to do so.

Software Engineering as a University Major?

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@jon_moore asked his Twitter followers what would Software Engineering as a University Major look like and he posted the interesting replies to to a storify post worth checking out. I found an interesting article, at Dr. Dobbs by Chuck Connell, on contrasts between Software Engineering and Computer Science that I largely agree with.

John Allspaw: “There is no Resilience Engineering … without real dialogue about real practice in the world.”

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John Allspaw wrote a fascinating roundup of his thoughts on the 6th Resilience Engineering Symposium.

This, in particular, caught my eye:

There is no Resilience Engineering (or Cognitive Systems Engineering or Systems Safety for that matter) without real dialogue about real practice in the world. In other words, there is no such thing as purely academic here.

(via @jon_moore)

Philadelphia Central High Robotics Team is Going to the World Championship!

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Watch the inspiring news segment on the RoboLancers at NBC10. Go RoboLancers!

Watch: Jacob Kaplan-Moss Keynote at Pycon 2015

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35 minutes that are absolutely worth it. Watch Jacob Kaplan-Moss at PyCon 2015 explain why he is a ‘mediocre programmer’ and why we need to take a hard look at our industry, how we define our careers, and the myths we tell, because they are flawed, and we are all the lesser as long as it remains so:

Kathleen Vignos, Director of Engineering at Wired.com, on its new design

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Read Kathleen Vignos, Director of Engineering at Wired.com, on their new design, and launch on a new Web stack. It looks like Wired.com has joined a growing, varied, and impressive list of large media sites using WordPress, including Time.com, Beyonce, Google Ventures, GM, Ted, Nasa, and Forbes. I pulled together that list recently when putting together material for the TechGirlz and Comcast class on Worpress that I participated in. It was nice reading about some of the deployment and development pipeline they are building there. Nice work Wired.com.

Lifehacker’s 10 Ways to Teach Yourself to Code

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Normally I wouldn’t pass along a list like this, but Lifehacker’s done a decent job listing 10 paths to teach yourself how to code.

Practical Data Science with Python

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@radimrehurek has put together a fantastic intro to Python data manipulation using an iPython notebook that is worthy of bookmarking and keeping as reference as to what you can do quickly with Python.

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“Distributed big balls of mud”

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Read Simon Brown’s post about how microservices are not the Silver Bullet some are promoting them to be.  As always, pick the right tool for the problem *and* for who will be solving it (the team and organization matters!!!). Sometimes, yes, that’s microservices. Sometimes it’s not. Pick your poison, but do so with open eyes and a level of clarity.