A recent series of tweets about identifying 10x software engineers set off a lot of making fun of the author for perpetuating a myth. Given the wording of the tweets too they made a particularly easy target (I can’t actually find them right now or I would link to them). All that poking fun though obscures some interesting questions about individual and team productivity in software engineering. Before getting to software though I want to point to a related interesting phenomenon. Just three p...

I love programming. I also encourage people to learn some programming because (a) it is a useful way of thinking and (b) much of the world will be programmable. Here is a quick example that I just encountered when I prepared yesterday’s Tech Tuesday Index. I had a document with links to every post looking like this:But what I really wanted were the post titles as the text for each link. Now I could have manually gone and followed each link, copied the post title and then replaced the text. Te...

A recent series of tweets about identifying 10x software engineers set off a lot of making fun of the author for perpetuating a myth. Given the wording of the tweets too they made a particularly easy target (I can’t actually find them right now or I would link to them). All that poking fun though obscures some interesting questions about individual and team productivity in software engineering. Before getting to software though I want to point to a related interesting phenomenon. Just three p...

I love programming. I also encourage people to learn some programming because (a) it is a useful way of thinking and (b) much of the world will be programmable. Here is a quick example that I just encountered when I prepared yesterday’s Tech Tuesday Index. I had a document with links to every post looking like this:But what I really wanted were the post titles as the text for each link. Now I could have manually gone and followed each link, copied the post title and then replaced the text. Te...

Earlier this year I had a blog post about how writing software applications in-house is making a comeback. I was reminded of this when I attended the HackNY hackathon at NYU over the weekend. I was there to help Susan with representing Ziggeo, her startup, which provides an API for video recording and playback. The number of APIs and open source projects out there that do amazing things is simply staggering. Watching some other NY based startups present their APIs and feeling the excitement a...

Earlier this year I had a blog post about how writing software applications in-house is making a comeback. I was reminded of this when I attended the HackNY hackathon at NYU over the weekend. I was there to help Susan with representing Ziggeo, her startup, which provides an API for video recording and playback. The number of APIs and open source projects out there that do amazing things is simply staggering. Watching some other NY based startups present their APIs and feeling the excitement a...

Another topic that I have written a lot about here on Continuations are patents and in particular software patents. While there is a lot of reform that I would love to see I have also come to appreciate that sometimes the only way to get there is in small steps. One relatively meaningful step was just introduced by Senator Schumer. The basic idea is to allow for a much fast tracked review of many of the suspect business process patents used by patent trolls to sue startups and larger tech com...

Another topic that I have written a lot about here on Continuations are patents and in particular software patents. While there is a lot of reform that I would love to see I have also come to appreciate that sometimes the only way to get there is in small steps. One relatively meaningful step was just introduced by Senator Schumer. The basic idea is to allow for a much fast tracked review of many of the suspect business process patents used by patent trolls to sue startups and larger tech com...

It’s only two months ago that I posted that these are Apple’s glory years and that it is likely too soon to bet against Apple’s stock. As it turns out I was wrong. When I wrote, the stock was at $650/share and now it is at $550/share, which is down 15% (and it is down over 20% from the top of about $700/share). One of the big drivers here is a decline in customer satisfaction and loyalty. I believe a lot of that is driven by software. A bunch of people I know have folders on their iPhones lab...

It’s only two months ago that I posted that these are Apple’s glory years and that it is likely too soon to bet against Apple’s stock. As it turns out I was wrong. When I wrote, the stock was at $650/share and now it is at $550/share, which is down 15% (and it is down over 20% from the top of about $700/share). One of the big drivers here is a decline in customer satisfaction and loyalty. I believe a lot of that is driven by software. A bunch of people I know have folders on their iPhones lab...

There is something very exciting going on in the world of software: a shift towards developing new application software in-house (as opposed to relying on third party offerings). For instance, at USV we have developed the linksharing on usv.com and our new analyst application process. Why does that make sense now? Because writing small applications has become so easy that it is today’s equivalent of writing an Excel macro. Chris Dixon has a good post yesterday where he describes some of the t...

There is something very exciting going on in the world of software: a shift towards developing new application software in-house (as opposed to relying on third party offerings). For instance, at USV we have developed the linksharing on usv.com and our new analyst application process. Why does that make sense now? Because writing small applications has become so easy that it is today’s equivalent of writing an Excel macro. Chris Dixon has a good post yesterday where he describes some of the t...

Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced the problem of concurrency: multiple programs executing at the same time. I used an example of a naive program for updating a vote count that could lose votes if multiple instances run concurrently. So how do we deal with this problem? There are many different approaches that people have taken over time and I will only try to cover some of them. Since I am still traveling and keeping my posts short, today I will only cover the idea of atomic actions. An atomic ...

Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced the problem of concurrency: multiple programs executing at the same time. I used an example of a naive program for updating a vote count that could lose votes if multiple instances run concurrently. So how do we deal with this problem? There are many different approaches that people have taken over time and I will only try to cover some of them. Since I am still traveling and keeping my posts short, today I will only cover the idea of atomic actions. An atomic ...

Growing up in Germany I learned a lot about a legal system in which judges are only applying the law not also making it through their decisions. Precedent plays a very limited roll in the German system. It took me some time to come to grips with the US system. But now I have come to think that an independent judiciary that has the ability to influence the law through precedent is a wonderful balance to the executive and legislative branches. In this 4th of July week this is another independen...

Growing up in Germany I learned a lot about a legal system in which judges are only applying the law not also making it through their decisions. Precedent plays a very limited roll in the German system. It took me some time to come to grips with the US system. But now I have come to think that an independent judiciary that has the ability to influence the law through precedent is a wonderful balance to the executive and legislative branches. In this 4th of July week this is another independen...

Years ago I worked with the team at Tacoda on the technology for audience based targeting. Some of my work there wound up in a patent that was sold along with Tacoda to AOL. I don’t know if this patent is part of the patents recently sold by AOL to Microsoft but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. I also worked closely with Joshua on a number of patents filed for by del.icio.us and sold along with the company to Yahoo. Yahoo of course has recently started a massive patent lawsuit against Face...

Years ago I worked with the team at Tacoda on the technology for audience based targeting. Some of my work there wound up in a patent that was sold along with Tacoda to AOL. I don’t know if this patent is part of the patents recently sold by AOL to Microsoft but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. I also worked closely with Joshua on a number of patents filed for by del.icio.us and sold along with the company to Yahoo. Yahoo of course has recently started a massive patent lawsuit against Face...

Last Tech Tuesday, we learned about atomic actions as a way of dealing with the problems arising from concurrency. I ended that post by pointing to the limits of atomic actions – most notably that the operating system and/or database system cannot provide arbitrarily complex atomic actions as it cannot possibly anticipate all the needs of different programs. At the time I also raised the question as to how atomic actions can be provided in the first place! Let’s start with the second question...

Last Tech Tuesday, we learned about atomic actions as a way of dealing with the problems arising from concurrency. I ended that post by pointing to the limits of atomic actions – most notably that the operating system and/or database system cannot provide arbitrarily complex atomic actions as it cannot possibly anticipate all the needs of different programs. At the time I also raised the question as to how atomic actions can be provided in the first place! Let’s start with the second question...