Category: tech

Quotes from a talk by Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson: A Lesson From Amazon’s Bezos:

I remember one of these all-hands meetings, somebody asked a question, and I don’t even remember what the question was,” said Lawson. “But I remember what Jeff’s response was. Jeff said, ‘We are a software company, just as much as that other company down in Redmond,’” a reference to Microsoft (MSFT).

What a great definition of what it is to be a software person: people who solve business problems with magnetic particles; not just developers, but people throughout a company who are able to see business problems who are trying to solve them through this lens. Software people fundamentally believe any problem can be solved once you pull that problem into the realm of software.”

And, “It’s a great time to be a software developer,” said Lawson. That’s because the smartphone is “digitizing” more and more of the world, bringing into into the domain of software.

Interview done in 2005. Memorable quote: Testing is like flossing–good for you but most people don’t do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zaCvLVU70o

Interesting article on why Google engineers think Windows Defender is best antivirus software.

I watched DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) rant about TDD being overkill sometime ago, and caught up on the chats he had with a couple of it’s creators, Kent Beck & Martin Fowler over the last week.

David had his point: creating multiple lines of test code for one line of real code is overboard, but that’s not what Kent had in mind when he created TDD for himself. It’s a much more nuanced conversation to hear the programmers talk it out.

It’s also interesting to note that I also listened to Kent talk about his time at Facebook, where no one was interested in his TDD method and extreme programming ideas, and he had to learn about Facebook’s different programming environment.

And Uncle Bob (Rob Martin) chimed in with a lot of insight (he’s delightfully intelligent) in another video I was watching over the weekend about being at the conference in Colorado where the Agile Manifesto was created–stating that it was the manifesto was due in part to a reaction to a previous generational event–because the number of programmers was doubling every five years, the waterfall process was invented to give discipline and process to the young guns coming out of college who didn’t know much about programming.

The periodic dip in each chart is end of Dec. every year. Drupal is at 25% of where it started from 5 years ago, but WordPress is about the same. From the simple queries put into Google Trends: drupal & wordpress.

“WordPress is used by 58.5% of all the websites whose content management system we know. This is 27.1% of all websites.” —from w3techs.com. (Drupal is used by 3% of websites.)

A couple interesting posts from a drupal / wordpress developer:

http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/17-reasons-wordpress-is-a-better-cms-than-drupal/

http://mikeschinkel.com/blog/the-decline-of-drupal-or-how-to-fix-drupal-8/

The second link talks about how the author thinks the Drupal collective is following the pattern of how Microsoft destroyed Visual Basic.

Someone asked me this week to talk tech about the CMS platform landscape so I did a little research about Drupal vs WordPress. About 3 years ago I did a demo, and another developer friend advocated Drupal over WordPress so I started working in Drupal. Unfortunately, the learning curve was way steeper than I thought it would be and I ended up coding the demo from scratch since learning Drupal was taking too long.

There’s something to be said for being able to get something working quickly–you can start working productively in WordPress in minutes, and I think that’s one reason why WordPress is so popular.