Topic: Software Development
Dan Bricklin discusses his new book, Bricklin on Technology, in which he talks about the human aspect of technology: how it is created, how it is used, and how it evolves. He talks about how the book came about and how he decided what content to include. He also reviews the particular issues in trying to adapt a book for the Amazon Kindle.
In this humorous talk from the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Damian Conway combines quantum mechanics and general relativity with Perl to write code that executes in constant time, zero time, and finally backwards in time.
Joel and Jeff discuss the launch of Server Fault, how you determine if your code is smelly (or just aromatic), how programmers learn by doing, and how good ideas are too crazy to copy until it's too late.
In this conversation with Joan Peckham, host Jon Udell continues a discussion about computational thinking that began in an earlier episode with Jeannette Wing, who now heads the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation. Joan Peckham, who is on leave from teaching computer science at the University of Rhode Island, is working with the NSF to define and promote computational thinking as an intellectual style that everyone can usefully learn and apply.
Joel and Jeff sit down with Joel's business partner Michael Pryor to discuss the wonders of the Computer History Museum, the value of meta, the D.I.Y. ethos, and whether studying black hat techniques is important to programmers.
You know you've been there! You're pulling your hair out trying to debug some Javascript code that's making your company's home page crash, but you just can't find the error. Before you end up bald, or balder, then maybe Firebug can offer some help. With a powerful, yet easy-to-use web-site inspector, Firebug can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. In this session John J. Barton demonstrates Firebug's JavaScript performance analysis and debugging capabilities for dynamic JavaScript web pages.
Joel and Jeff sit down with Steve Yegge to discuss his JavaScript compilation project, a generalized "Google-y" approach for plugging language support into editors, and the overall importance and philosophy of language tooling.
Three participants in the Utah Open Source Foundation discuss how smaller local computer user groups can build into organizations that reach people in larger areas. They give some background about the foundation and talk about how the Utah Open Source Conference has become a useful way for interested participants to get more involved. They also review some useful methods to start a conference and how best to grow it from year to year.
Jeremy Kemper, one of the largest contributors to the Ruby on Rails framework, talks about various techniques to improve performance in this presentation at the O'Reilly European Rails Conference. This is a must-listen presentation for anyone who is interested in optimizing the performance of Rails-based web applications.
Joel and Jeff, with guest Alex Papadimoulis of The Daily WTF, discuss the distinction between IT/sysadmins and programmers, online justice for webforums, user-friendly IDs for databases, and the future of software distribution.
