Scala is the implementation language of choice on the next big project I'll be working on. For me, that's a tiny bit of a disappointment, as I've been slowly building up my knowledge, not of Scala, but of Haskell. But the high-level software at the observatory is predominantly Java, so …

Guilty as charged: jQuery Events: Stop (Mis)Using Return False | Fuel Your Coding.

What ebook designers can learn from Bible-reading software - OReilly Radar.

This is a good article on eBook design, as informed by Bible-study software. Bible-study software is a niche that every software entrepreneur would do well to know about. It's a big market and it attracts enthusiastic and diverse developers who …

The Fun of Going Faster-Than-Light : Starts With A Bang.

To the extent I would have ever thought about it, by symmetry I would think that a tachyon entering a medium in which it moved slower than c would emit some kind of impossible-to-detect tachyon-y version of Čerenkov Radiation, but apparently …

Ramsey's Theorem.

We've just shipped our first application whose core algorithm was written in Scala. Regrettably, the project didn't lend itself to "getting our feet wet," and it basically boiled down to the Scala modules being black boxes while the rest of us worked in more pedestrian technologies such as Java and …

I disagree with a lot in this post Process kills developer passion

...maybe junior (or specialized) developers should be writing the unit tests, leaving the more seasoned developers free to concentrate on the actual implementation of the application. Maybe you don't need to micro-manage them with daily updates to VersionOne …

Act 1

A charismatic con man declares that the world is going to end on a specific date. He calls for donations, ostensibly to alert nonbelievers of the joyful and ominous news.

Act 2

The meme goes viral and all of a sudden, his normal income from donations increase 1000x …

Although it's a little heavy on IBM-specific acronyms and trademarks ("Agility\@Scale"), this relatively brief (20-page) whitepaper from Scott Ambler does a good job showing how agile processes are not just laissez faire "let them hack" chaos. Although this diagram makes me cringe a little (what's with the I Ching …

One of the buzzwords that has become more popular in recent years is "continuous delivery." The idea is that you fully automate your deployment pipeline and put a new version of your software in front of your users at least every day. If features are partially implemented, you use the …