Topic: Software Development

Are you Cowboysaurus rex? Or Signaturus maximus? Find yourself in this taxonomy of change management practices. Learn the pros and cons of each classification and how well they fare as developers and operations try to work together to create value for their organization. Andrew Shafer, Engineering Lead at Cloud Scaling, says well-meaning managers throw problems into the "meat cloud."; they throw bodies at their problem. Others employ the FSOP method: "flying by the seat of the pants."

Computer software and hardware have greatly advanced over the last 30 years, but database architectures haven't changed in response. Slava Akhmechet and Michael Glukhovsky of RethinkDB are creating a whole new style of database to take advantage of new developments like fast solid state hard drives and new research on file systems.

Computer code is not yet art, but it could be. Neal Ford discusses aesthetics, constraints, creativity, and why the Ruby on Rails community is closer to art than other programming communities. He implores developers to create and define their own tastes, rather than merely consume what others have created.

The human perception of web response time can be manipulated, says Yahoo! engineer Stoyan Stefanov. He talks about the subjective experience of time as experienced by Internet users. This understanding can help developers who are trying to "make the page feel faster, although it isn't." Some techniques and tricks for web developers can minimize frustration and enhance the browsing experience for end users.

The Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK) loads into a Canon camera and enhances the firmware, giving the photographer more functions. One of its developers, Reed Mideke, discusses the project. He reviews the background of CHDK and talks about some of the options added by it. He also details some of the programming steps necessary to control Canon cameras.

Twitter's new Director of Geolocation shows how automatically geo-tagging tweets creates self-generating groups that act in the real-world. Twitter geotaggers help responders with fires in Southern California, earthquakes in China, and elections in Iran. At the where2.0 conference in San Jose, Othman Laraki offers Twitter API developers 'frictionless' ways to express and consume this new class of geodata.

Don't just think about the cloud. Think about where it is taking us. Online collaboration is the first wave of a movement transforming how people network. A healthy commons is the real value of open source, making collaboration easier. This collaboration has assisted response to several recent calamities around the world. Tim O'Reilly believes we will need the communication open source allows in order to overcome a wide array of future challenges.

WebHooks are meant to do something. The concept of a WebHook is simple. It is an HTTP callback: an HTTP POST that occurs when something happens; a simple event-notification via HTTP POST. Developer Jeff Lindsay talks about what a WebHook is and how it works as a programming API. He also discusses some of the current uses of the concept.

There is no "in crowd" in the Ruby development community, so you shouldn't be worried about being excluded. Yehuda Katz of EngineYard shares stories of several important contributors to Ruby and Rails who started out knowing nothing, but through hard work and persistence created value for the whole community. Katz: just find something that looks impossible and do it!

The elmcity project "collects online calendar events for geographic or topical communities." Meant to demonstrate the capabilities of Microsoft's Azure platform, it presents an opportunity for individuals to become curators for events. Jon Udell discusses the web service and how it demonstrates how we are sources for public data.