Between love and madness lies HighScalability:Google now 10x better: MapReduce sorts 1 petabyte of data using 8000 computers in 33 minutes; 1 Billion on Social Networks;Tumblr at 10 Billion Posts; Twitter at 100 Million Users; Testing at Google Scale: 1800 builds, 120 million test suites, 60 million tests run daily.From the Dash Memo on Google's Plan: Go is a very promising systems-programming language in the vein of C++. We fully hope and expect that Go becomes the standard back-end language at Google over the next few years. On GAE Go can load fro...

Are you looking to set up an independent game development team?  You’ll need a team that covers all areas of game development including programming, art, design, sound, project management and business.  You need to pick the right people that can work together for months or even years.  Below are some tips for putting the right team together to increase your chances of success.RolesGame development involves a number of common roles as well as some overlooked ones.  Individual team members can handle multiple roles on smaller teams and some roles can be shared by more ...

Much of the tension in product development and interface design comes from trying to balance the obvious, the easy, and the possible. Figuring out which things go in which bucket is critical to fully understanding how to make something useful. Shouldn’t everything be obvious? Unless you’re making a product that just does one thing – like a paperclip, for example – everything won’t be obvious. You have to make tough calls about what needs to be obvious, what should be easy, and what should be possible. The more things something (a product, a feature, a screen,...

I’ve written a lot of blog posts in the past about pair programming and the advantages that I’ve seen from using this technique but lately I find myself increasingly frustrated at the need to pair 100% of the time which happens on most teams I work on.From my experience it’s certainly useful as a coaching tool, as I’ve mentioned before I think it’s a very useful for increasing the amount of collaboration between team members and an excellent way for ensuring that knowledge of the code base is spread across the team.On the other hand I no longer see it as the...

Me, I blame the IDE's.Coding used to be hard. Not because programming itself was overly hard, but mostly because editors absolutely sucked. How much the typical development environment in the 70's and 80's sucked is hard to convey (except for a very lucky few, and those would have likely been using DEC and WANG gear). I got in on the tail end of the punch card era. Punching your own program is lots of fun. Once. And if you drop a deck you get to play with the sorter, which is also lots of fun (ok, maybe twice, invariably, on every third usage the sorter would jam and that would be really reall...

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the iPhone 4S. Andthe first reviews came in about the Kindle Fire.On paper, the Nook Tablet is the...

This week, Hewlett-Packard (where I am on the board) announced that it is exploring jettisoning its struggling PC business in favor of investing more heavily in software, where it sees better potential for growth. Meanwhile, Google plans to buy up the cellphone handset maker Motorola Mobility. Both moves surprised the tech world. But both moves are also in line with a trend I've observed, one that makes me optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies, despite the recent turmoil in the stock market.In short, software is eating the world.More than 10 years after the pea...

How many times have you tried to get something done that needed some touch of originality and creativity and yet got that annoying mind block which is manifested by blank stares, scratching and biting on anything in reach? “all the damn time” I hear?As preconditions to be creative, one should know something well while having the utmost focus on it. Someone who knows little about aerodynamics can’t come up with the idea for next concord. And focus has two aspects: knowing a specified area well (focus area) and being able to bring most of those neurons to work on it. How do yo...