Topic: Software Development
Joel and Jeff discuss Rock Band 2, the "big universe of dumb programmers", and the general anthropology of developing social software.
Google's new browser Chrome is one of the topics of discussion with Phil, Scott, and Ben. In addition to its terms of service, that talk about its background, including Google's comic that introduced the new software. They also discuss Perl, Apache modules, and Ajax programming.
If you think that Sun Microsystems is that Java company, then you've a lot of news to catch up on. Charles Nutter, co-lead on the JRuby project at Sun, gives a quick round-up of a plethora of initiatives that Sun is working on, for the individual open source developer and the little start-up guy, besides bringing Ruby to the enterprise.
Joel and Jeff discuss deadlocks, logging philosophy, the value and risks of taking dependencies on your project, and why you want to work with people who don't always do what you ask them to. Really!
"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." That is the goal of Wikipedia's creator, Jimmy Wales. He has set his sights on Google and the other corporate Search Engines with his new project "Wikia," a personal search engine-builder.
Joel Spolsky is a highly revered software pundit, an eminent author, the host of one of the most widely read blogs, the co-founder of New York based FogCreek Software, and a witty and intelligent person to listen to. He believes that the three key ingredients that make great software are: making users happy, obsessing over aesthetics, and observing culture code. In elaborating these ideas with plenty of examples, he doesn't spare his wonderful sense of humor.
Identi.ca is an open microblogging service. Users can post short messages about themselves to Identi.ca, which are then broadcast to friends in their social network using instant messages (IM), RSS feeds, and the Web.
The product's developer, Evan Prodromou, joins Phil and Scott to discuss the project, including its open source license.
Joel and Jeff discuss scaling and social effects in Stack Overflow, how to handle growth and the launch in a controlled way, and answer listener questions about backups, database design, and maintenance programming.
David Recordon, Open Platforms Tech Lead for Six Apart, pitches the telephony community on grassroots efforts as a means for the development of open standards. Grassroots community groups can serve as the catalyst for addressing challenges that corporate groups have chosen to ignore, and begin to bridge gaps between existing web technologies and mobile service providers.
For MIT's Project SIMILE, David Huynh built an amazing series of web tools for exploring and organizing structured information. Two months into his new gig at Metaweb, he's done it again. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell asks Huynh about his Parallax prototype, which creates a powerful new way for users to click their way through related sets of information in Freebase. In essence, a Wikipedia-like database built on a semantic web foundation.
