The Insider News

Hack a Day[^]:

Fran went all-out with her reverse engineering of the Apollo Saturn V LVDC board. Regular readers will remember that she was showing of the relic early this year when she took the board to her Dentist’s office to X-ray the circuit design. Since then she’s been hard at work trying to figure out how the thing functions using that look inside the board and components. When we say ‘hard at work’ we really mean it. Not only did she explore many different theories that resulted in dead ends, she also built her own version of the circuits to make sure they performed as she theorized.

Kalzumeus Software[^]:

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.

Life in This World[^]:

The designers of Go agree with the collective experience of the last twenty years of programming that there are three basic data types a modern language needs to provide as built-ins: Unicode strings, variable length arrays (called “slices” in Go), and hash tables (called “maps”). Languages that don’t provide those types at a syntax level cannot be called modern anymore. (And what’s up with all the languages that claim all you need are linked lists? I’m sorry, this is not 1958, and you are not John McCarthy.) Go strings are UTF-8 because Go was designed by the guys who invented UTF-8, so why not?

Sergi Mansilla[^]:

I hear some of you, already. Just when you were over with that mess that it is to manipulate the DOM and that sneaky JavaScript language. Just when you learned to love the highly architected Android classes and managers or iOS’s beautiful method naming, why would we be back to that mayhem that is writing web applications? Didn’t we agree that HTML was not, after all, good enough for making real and performing apps?

ongoing by Tim Bray[^]:

Whether you like XML or not, we’re stuck with it for a long time. These days, the only new XML-based projects being started up are document-centric and publishing-oriented. Thank goodness, because that’s a much better fit than all the WS-* and Java EE config puke and so on that has given those three letters a bad name among so many programmers. XML for your document database is actually pretty hard to improve on.

ZDNet[^]:

What one Microsoft program or product that was never fully developed or released do you wish had made it to market? Gates: "We had a rich database as the client/cloud store that was part of a Windows release that was before its time. This is an idea that will remerge since your cloud store will be rich with schema rather than just a bunch of files and the client will be a partial replica of it with rich schema understanding." For those who may not know, Gates was referencing WinFS, or Windows Future Storage.

smartbear.com[^]:

If quotation frequency was a measurement of significance, Gordon Moore definitely would be the most important semiconductor engineer in history. Moore's Law – which states the number of transistors in semiconductors doubles every 18 months – has been Silicon Valley canon law for 40 years. However, Moore’s Law has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with marketing.... While engineering is not a one-man show, it was two engineers at competing companies who led their employer’s respective evolution of the x86 architecture: Pat Gelsinger and Derrick “Dirk” Meyer.... After more than 30 years, the x86 architecture continues to grow, when most technologies go obsolete within a decade.

firstround.com[^]:

Even science recognizes that diversity is important: research from both the Kellogg and Sloan Schools suggest that cognitively diverse teams perform better on hard problems. Beyond that, though, hiring for diversity will set up better recruiting opportunities. Consider Harvard’s graduating computer science class: forty-one percent of the students are women, and an inability to hire talented females will start to significantly impact your ability to recruit altogether.

The Baseline Scenario[^]:

While Excel the program is reasonably robust, the spreadsheets that people create with Excel are incredibly fragile. There is no way to trace where your data come from, there’s no audit trail (so you can overtype numbers and not know it), and there’s no easy way to test spreadsheets, for starters. The biggest problem is that anyone can create Excel spreadsheets—badly. Because it’s so easy to use, the creation of even important spreadsheets is not restricted to people who understand programming and do it in a methodical, well-documented way.

CodeProject[^]:

CodeProject wants to help women get involved and build careers in programming. What can we do? We asked some prominent female programmers, and this is what we learned.