Topic: Software Development
November 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of RFC 2445, the iCalendar specification that governs the exchange of calendar information on the Internet. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell invites one of the authors of RFC2445, Derik Stenerson, to reflect on the history of the venerable standard, and to consider new ways it might be applied in our era of personal publishing.
It's a Yeggethon! Joel and Jeff sit down with Steve Yegge to discuss Google, programming languages, writing code, and just plain writing. This episode runs long as a tribute to Steve.
Micah Sifry discusses his work with the Sunlight Foundation, an organization using the power of the Internet to strengthen the relationship between citizens and their elected officials and to foster public trust in Congress. He talks about the technical details of the site, including its API and how it makes its data available.
Rails 2 has a lot of things to feel happy about. Jeremy Kemper, one of the earliest and one of the largest contributors to the Ruby on Rails framework, gives a detailed explanation of the new features in Rails 2.0 and 2.1.
Allvoices bills itself as "the first open media site where anyone can report from anywhere," but two things that really set it apart are its geolocated citizen media posts from any device, and the zeal of its founder, Silicon Valley veteran Amra Tareen. Learn how her journey from computer scientist to venture capitalist to stereotyped Muslim woman to startup CEO shaped Allvoices.
Joel and Jeff conduct a special NYC roundtable discussion with every member of the Stack Overflow team present: Jarrod Dixon, Geoff Dalgas, and Michael Pryor.
Joel and Jeff discuss the Stack Overflow team's expedition to NYC, the seven crucial mistakes we made during development, and how to bridge the skill spectrum between beginning and expert software developers.
Other frameworks have cloned features of Rails. But according to its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson, the Rails philosophy of convention over configuration and abstracting the user from making choices, continues to give its developer community a competitive advantage. The only parallel that can compete will have to be something that is significantly better than Rails which, although it is a possibility, doesn't seem very likely.
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with the author of "Crowdsourcing," Jeff Howe, who explains the concept of sourcing work or requests out to a crowd on the internet.
Joel and Jeff cover the launch of Stack Overflow, and have an extended discussion with Josh Millard of MetaFilter on how to design social software on the web.
