Topic: Software Development
This week, the Stack Exchange podcast travels to England, where Jeff and Joel are joined by Stack Overflow legend Jon Skeet (and son!) along with Marc Gravell.
After the earthquake in Haiti, a community of crisis mappers immediately began crowdsourcing open street maps in a way that has changed disaster response forever. Using an open source stack and simple collaboration tools to annotate image sets, usable maps were quickly put in the hands of rescue workers, allowing an unprecedented rapid response that saved lives. Many lessons, technical and operational, are shared on how to build and sustain momentum for rapid, meaningful data sharing that can dramatically impact relief efforts.
Jeff and Joel are joined this week by Scott Hanselmen - developer and commenter extraordinaire. Their wide ranging conversation covers everything from the MIX11 conference to the varying quality of salads at Jack in the Bpx - check it out!
We're back for week two of the re-launched Stack Exchange Podcast! Joel and Jeff get right back into the old swing of things and dive into some of the recent site launches, valuable tools for remembering the history of the internet and questions for our listeners on directions we should take. Check it out!
How much does a 1-second transaction cost you? This is exactly what Aladdin Nassar, one of three performance engineers for Windows Live Hotmail, is trying to find out. Hear how they measure and track 1.3 billion accounts at Microsoft, to improve the performance of Windows Live Hotmail, end to end.
Do we know how to design successful social environments? Is "social experience design" understood as well as "visual design" or "interaction design"? Not yet, says Xianhang Zhang. He believes social design is still in its pre-scientific era: inefficient, error-prone, and unpredictable. Hang calls for a formal theory of social experience design and describes his own theoretical framework. As a first exercise of his principles, he is creating a Design Guild as a way to foster better designers.
Careful study of Amazon.com reveals design treasures of surprising value. Jared Spool has studied Amazon for years and developed insights into which design elements create more sales, and why. But he cautions designers not to copy Amazon blindly. Some features only work for the dominant on-line retailer. Some don't even work for Amazon, whose site is peppered with "dead soldiers," the remnants of abandoned experiments. Along the way, Jared points out funny effects of Amazon's automation at scale. Even those show Amazon has much teach us.
Commerce enters a new phase which brings back "local and personal", Google's Osama Bedier explains. But the innovation won't come without its challenges. These trends require payments to become completely digital, inventories to move to the cloud and platforms that determine user identity to become interoperable. After hurdling these barriers, technology can bring commerce back to the intimacy of 50 years ago. Sellers hope to see the return of traditional consumer loyalty as well.
While much open source software suffers from poor design and usability, Firefox shines. What makes the Mozilla community different? With great branding, usability backed up by research but tempered by realism, and a powerful extension architecture, the Firefox web browser claims 400 million users. On the eve of the release of Firefox 4, Mozilla designer Alex Faaborg covers the unique challenge of coordinating user experience design in an open source community, important features of past versions, and the future of the Firefox interface.
Deborah Estrin talks about GIS tracing of individual activity, it's fascinating usefulness, and potential privacy drawbacks. She assesses how combining tools such as location trace and environmental data with a wellness focus can inform public policy and personal decision making. According to Estrin experience sampling can yield data points which help patients to adjust and cope with medications. On the other hand, these living records can be intimate traces almost impossible to erase.
