Topic: Software Development
Guido van Rossum reflects on the early days of the Python community, describes its development into maturity, and explains why he is still having a good time after 13 years of herding cats. In an entertaining and informative talk, he also describes the origin of many of Python's most characteristic features and compares Python to some of the other languages in widespread use today. Part 2 of 2. [SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series audio from IT Conversations]
Does IT really matter? Have we reached the end of innovation in the Software industry? Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, doesn't think so and makes a convincing case that the software industry is undergoing a revolution, which will create even further innovations. This is known as Web 2.0 and it is changing that way software companies are executing their
business strategy. The second generation of the Internet is forcing these companies to transform their development, delivery and licensing models and to re-examine their core competencies. [Web 2.0 audio from IT Conversations]
Whereas the life expectancy of people is steadily increasing with time this is not the case for business. Today business life expectancy is decreasing and is touching all types of businesses. Join Dr. Jim Goodnight, founder and CEO of SAS, the largest privately owned software company, speak on growing and sustaining the long-term enterprise. SAS has been in business for three decades and has sustained a 10-15 percent growth during its lifetime. Listen to discover the SAS secret sauce. [Software 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
Is Mozilla the most remixed application platform of all? It may be, given the number of third-party extensions available for Firefox and Thunderbird. In this High Order Bits presentation from O'Reilly's Emerging Technology 2005 conference, Brendan Eich of the Mozilla Foundation details the APIs Mozilla offers for extensibility and application remixing. [ETech audio from IT Conversations]
How does a five million dollar company become a fifty million
dollar company and eventually a five hundred million dollar
company in the high tech industry? Join a panel of CEO's as
they share their thoughts and experiences on building a business
capable of sustaining long periods of growth. Along the way you
will discover the social and technical challenges they faced and
how they triumphed. [Software 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
With the recent acquisition of PeopleSoft behind it, Oracle is changing
the game on many fronts. Charles Phillips, Oracle President, speaks
candidly about the Information Age Application strategy and how it is
bridging the gap in the packaged application space. Oracle is already two
years into the strategy, which promises to simplify, standardize and
automate information in the enterprise. [Software 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
Ease is God. You don't have to be the first to win. Software can save marriages. Commercial entities can improve millions more people's lives than non-profits. Businesses are meant to do good to society. It must be Scott Cook talking. Listen to Larry Magid talk to Scott Cook, founder of Intuit and the man behind Quicken and Turbo Tax in this wide ranging interview on this week's edition of Larry's World. [Larry's World audio from IT Conversations]
Are we seeing the emergence of the Big 5 in the software industry? What are the changes shaping the software industry today? Madhavan "M.R." Rangaswami, founder of Sand Hill Group and Sandhill.com and a veteran of the software industry, raises and answers these questions in his short, information packed talk as he kicks of the Software 2005 show. [Software 2005 audio from IT Conversations]
Unlike architects (who figure out what to build) and engineers (who figure out how), great hackers and painters do both. Who makes a good hacker and how can you identify a good hacker/programmer in a job interview? Why is empathy an important skill for programmers? As a hacker who also studied painting in Europe, Paul may be uniquely qualified to write a book entitled Hackers and Painters. If you leave your day programming job only to get home and write more code, this is a great book for you.
J2EE, .Net, who needs em? Apparently not Amazon, Google, Yahoo or Sabre. Peter Yared, who headed up the Liberty Alliance project at Sun, took notice, left Sun and founded ActiveGrid, a company dedicated to building Web applications upon LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl), XML, Javascript and DHTML. As for grids, Yared maintains there are really three types: computational, utility (on-demand) and transaction grids (an example of which is ActiveGrid). He explains what makes a transaction grid different than using conventional load balancing software. How does ActiveGrid stack up against Microsoft's forthcoming Indigo? Why did ActiveGrid choose the Apache open source license for its base technology?
