Semantic Versioning I propose a simple set of rules and requirements that dictate how version numbers are assigned and incremented. For this system to work, you first need to declare a public API. This may consist of documentation or be enforced by the code itself. Regardless, it is important that this API be clear and precise. Once you identify your public API, you communicate changes to it with specific increments to your version number. Consider a version format of X.Y.Z (Major.Minor.Patch). Bug fixes not affecting the API increment the patch version, backwards compatible API additions/changes increment the minor version, and backwards incompatible API changes increment the major version. (categories: developmentsoftwareapispecificationversioning )
The Importance Of What You Say – Forbes.com One potent thread in the fabric of reasons why some ideas take off and others don’t is the ability entrepreneurs have to explain to others why they should care. The bigger the idea, the more explaining the world demands. Yet these skills are constantly trivialized in many organizations, leading to dozens of great ideas being rejected, and their creators wondering why lesser rivals with weaker concepts are able to capture people’s imaginations and pocketbooks. (categories: communicationspeakingideasinnovation )
rc3.org – RSS readers are for professionals If you’re a serious consumer of information from a wide variety of sites, there’s still no substitute for subscribing to feeds in an RSS reader. Twitter is great, but it’s not the same. And I think that’s particularly true if you’re a blogger. If you’re just linking to the stuff that people are all talking about on Twitter or that floats to the top of Hacker News, you may as well give up on your blog, as far as I’m concerned. Everybody already sees that stuff. You have to dig deeper to offer more interesting information, and an RSS reader is the best tool you can use for that purpose. (categories: rssatomfeedsreaderattentionstreamattentionblogging )
The Twitter API is Finished. Now What? – Anil Dash Twitter’s API has spawned over 50,000 applications that connect to it, taking the promise of fertile APIs we first saw with Flickr half a decade ago and bringing it to new heights. Now, the first meaningful efforts to support Twitter’s API on other services mark the maturation of the API as a de facto industry standard and herald the end of its period of rapid fundamental iteration. (categories: apitwitterplatformmicroblogging )
speedtracer – Project Hosting on Google Code Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux). (categories: performancejavascriptgoogleopensource )
YouTube Blog: Inside User Research at YouTube We still have a lot left to learn about how people use YouTube, but some things have become clear. One of the most important findings has to do with the difference between the large group of users who are on YouTube simply to watch videos and a smaller, but very important, group of more engaged users — often uploaders. The latter group will, unsurprisingly, care about details like how to make communication with their audience easier and more effective, how to grow their audience, and even how to make money on YouTube. The former, on the other hand, want as simple of an interface as possible: "Just let me watch the video, please!" (categories: youtubeusabilityresearchuxtestingdesignui )
Facebook | Facebook Data Team: Distributed Data Analysis at Facebook Today, Facebook counts 29% of its employees (and growing!) as Hive users. More than half (51%) of those users are outside of Engineering. They come from distinct groups like User Operations, Sales, Human Resources, and Finance. Many of them had never used a database before working here. Thanks to Hive, they are now all data ninjas who are able to move fast and make great decisions with data. (categories: facebookhadoopanalyticshivedatabigdata )
FT.com / Reportage – The rise and fall of MySpace The two sides differ profoundly over where responsibility lies for the site’s decline. Former MySpace executives say News Corp dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window. Facebook was quick to embrace Ajax but MySpace did not follow suit, partly because to do so would have reduced the number of page views the site generated and therefore its advertising revenue. “It would take five steps to post a comment or send a message, so five different pages would open,” explains another former executive. “There would be ads on each of those pages, so we were making money. We went to News Corp and said: ‘We want to change this but in the short term our revenues will drop.’ It became a long back and forth. [They] were pushing back – they wanted to make sure we weren’t going to drop our revenue numbers.” (categories: myspacebusinessfacebooksocialmediamanagementprodu )
rc3.org – Performance reviews for developers Quote: "… the most important part of a performance review is to help the person getting the review get better at their job. It’s a chance for people to get feedback that will help them figure out which skills they need to improve and determine where they may be lacking in terms of professionalism. The second most important part of a performance review is to help the manager get as much value out of the employee as possible. Does this person work better undisturbed most of the time or regularly collaborating with others? Is this person happiest grinding away at hard problems that discourage most people? Do they like or dislike refactoring old code that could use improvement?" (categories: managementengineeringmotivation )
Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Facebook Seattle Engineering Road Show: Mike Shroepfer on Engineering at Scale at Facebook Stats from the road show: Average number of friends per user is 130, Total number of Facebook applications is 350,00, It is the number 1 Photo Site on the Web, More events are created on the site than on Evite per day, People spend 6 8 billion minutes per day on Facebook which makes it the number 1 site on the Web according to many measurement services including Nielsen and ComScore, The fastest growing demographic is users aged 35 and older., The page with the most fans is Barack Obama with 6.8 million fans, The TV show with the most fans is South Park., 70% of their users are outside the United States of America (categories: facebookscalabilityarchitecturescaling )
John Resig – Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer dynaTrace Ajax works by sticking low-level instrumentation into Internet Explorer when it launches, capturing any activity that occurs – and I mean virtually any activity that you can imagine. I noticed very little slow down when running the browser in tracing mode (although it’s sometimes hard to tell, considering the browser). However all of the tracing is recorded and saved for later, making it easy to record sessions for later analysis. (categories: javascriptperformanceietoolsajaxdebuggingbrowserdynatrace )
Unifying the Conversations (Salmon Protocol) As updates and content flow in real time around the Web, conversations around the content are becoming increasingly fragmented into individual silos. Salmon aims to define a standard protocol for comments and annotations to swim upstream to original update sources — and spawn more commentary in a virtuous cycle. It’s open, decentralized, abuse resistant, and user centric. (categories: socialpubsubhubbubcommentsstandardsatomfeedssalmon )
Turning Predictions into Opportunities – O’Reilly Radar Big data is being democratised, but there’s a lot of unmet need in businesses around data warehousing. The typical solution is to build a data warehouse team around a product like Oracle, but I’ve heard plenty of business people grizzling about the result. They want answers, they don’t want the headaches and lag that a data warehouse involve. Big Data (or Cloud Analytics or whatever) may be the opportunity to figure out a new minimum viable product for these folks, and offer it without the "data warehouse" baggage. This might be back end, might be UIs, might be visualisation, but all of these have a lot of room for improvement. (categories: trendsdataminingdataanalyticshadoopmapreduce )