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del.icio.us bookmarks - 2009-05-29

Posted by Delicious auto poster Sat, 30 May 2009 07:19:51 GMT

Adding Simplicity – An Engineering Mantra: Shard Lessons
- Worth reading just for the section on intelligently designing shard counts. Great discussion on picking counts that smooth your cost step function
- Posted: Fri May 29 20:36:03 UTC 2009

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Jul 20

Coding Horror: Groundhog Day, or, the Problem with A/B Testing
This posting deals largely with 37 Signals' concept of having opinionated software, but from the opposite end. "Phil wasn't making these choices because he honestly believed in them. He was making these choices because he wanted a specific outcome -- winning over Rita -- and the experimental data told him which path he should take. Although the date was technically perfect, it didn't ring true to Rita, and that made all the difference. That's the problem with A/B testing. It's empty. It has no feeling, no empathy, and at worst, it's dishonest. As my friend Nathan Bowers said: A/B testing is like sandpaper. You can use it to smooth out details, but you can't actually create anything with it. The next time you reach for A/B testing tools, remember what happened to Phil. You can achieve a shallow local maximum with A/B testing -- but you'll never win hearts and minds. If you, or anyone on your team, is still having trouble figuring that out, well, the solution is simple."

Jul 18

Jul 16

Jul 15

clementine-player - Project Hosting on Google Code
Port of Amarok 1.4 to qt4/not-kde. Sounds very interesting especially since Songbird just killed official linux support.

Jul 12

William's miscellaneous git tools
A bunch of useful git scripts for working with git repos

Jul 07

Jul 01

Postel’s Law vs the Whiteboard Marker Rule « Messages in a Bottle
Interesting take on versioning, backwards compatability, and Postel's Law (roughly: "be conservative in what you produce and liberal in what you accept"). Sometimes, this post argues, you have to clean up to avoid having too many choices only some of which actually work.