Please stop fighting A debate, even when heated, can result in insight, clarity, and a unified decision. Unfortunately, when a debate gets heated it is easy to make up our mind, lock into a position, and begin defending a viewpoint rather than working towards a solution. I believe that having tools to avoid bunkering helps…
Go is a return to C Go can best be understood as an improved implementation of C. From Wikipedia: Go is a statically typed, compiled programming language … with memory safety, garbage collection, structural typing,[6] and CSP-style concurrency. Compiled obviously means that before you run it, there’s a compiler that takes a look and makes…
…or, how to offend a lot of developers in a couple dozen paragraphs. [original publish date: 27-Jun-2008] Introduction I have not been and will never be a fan of strictly type checked languages. They are too fussy; I’ve spent too much time trying to wrestle the type system into submission. Types, to put it plainly,…
This post describes how to design an effective metrics portfolio, focusing on the distinction between durable output business metrics and input metrics. It explores the difference between business, health, and diagnostic metrics, and discusses three flavors of goals: output business goals, controllable input goals, and launch goals. It discusses the standard form in which all…
It has been broadly observed that Amazon is powered by a writing culture. Meetings at Amazon typically begin with at least twenty minutes of silent, communal reading. PowerPoints are rare, reserved for presentations to large audiences. However, I haven’t seen a lot of discussion of how Amazonians approach writing documents. This document attempts to address…
A quick follow-up to my post last week, “Why to Beat Wordle, or, How Information Theorists are No Fun At Parties,” which treats Wordle as an information theory problem. However, the analysis was incomplete, because I was unaware that Wordle has a Hard Mode. So, without a lot of preamble, because I wrote a Very…
