Topic: Software Development
Sxipper is a free Firefox add-on that saves you time by keeping track of an unlimited number of usernames and passwords as well as the personal data you share every day over the web. Dick Hardt, founder of Sxip, joins Phil, Scott, and Ben, to discuss the product, as well as the entire issue of privacy and identity on the web, as well as how to market plug-ins as products.
In the eighteenth episode of Stack Overflow, we finally meet Michael Pryor, the co-founder of Fog Creek Software -- and discuss the progress of the Stack Overflow beta in some depth.
Relating anecdotes from the past, Kent Beck, the father of Extreme Programming and JUnit, reflects back on the impact his ideas have had in the last 20 years, especially with respect to the history of Test Driven Development (TDD), Design Patterns, and Extreme Programming (XP). According to him, good ideas take about that much time to mature and come to fruition.
In this special "developer edition" podcast, Jeff and the Stack Overflow development team discuss the development processes and decisions that go into building a public community web site for programmers.
What is the impact of the world going on line? By any measure, it's huge. In order to thrive, argues MySQL's Marten Mickos, we must preserve two key types of freedom: the freedom to do things, and the freedoms that protect us. Highlighting key attributes of Ubuntu and MySQL that reflect these ideas, he illuminates the potential for opens source developers to further transform software, and the world, in positive ways.
Joel and Jeff discuss the perils of programmer design, the purpose of a private beta, the importance of quality chairs for programmers, and the mysterious cone of uncertainty on software projects.
Eucalyptus (Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems) is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. Rich Wolski, the director of the project, joins Phil to discuss it. He talks about how Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, as well as the difference between grid and cloud computing and the steps involved in installing and using it.
It's the special listener question show! Joel and Jeff answer questions from the audience on making the transition from developer to manager, how to Get Things Done, the hidden value of in-person code reviews, and more.
Joel and Jeff discuss hiding and disabling of menu items, whether conversational communication styles are destroying writing on the web, and the eternal flame of software engineering: the object to relational mapping problem.
Scott Lemon is not happy with Firefox 3.0 and he, Ben, and Phil use his dissatisfaction to begin a discussion of browsers and other tech topics. Phil gives some statistics of browser usage on his blog Technometria, and they talk about Canvas (the HTML element, not the material), as well as a number of other related subjects.
