The rj45 jacks in the office are just plain old dirty connections to the Inet. We each have multiple OpenVPN connections on our localhost giving us access to different parts of the network depending on our roles. It's convenient because our workstations work identically wherever we are ( home, work, coffee shop ) and it's convenient when someone leaves because operations just invalidates the VPN certs and the former employee is cut off no matter where they physically are. A side effect is whenever your VPN credentials don't work you're left wondering is you're about to get fired and ops just jumped the gun haha.

I wonder what impact this engine could have on the mobile frameworks out there ( JQM, PhoneJs etc ). The article states that they got the head mobile guy from Facebook. The next few months could get very interesting in that world.

"First of all, you don't need to meet their API spec, they need to meet yours." You're assuming so much in that sentence though. I've had conversations with health insurance companies where when I explain their systems are completely out of compliance with the protocol specification ( NCPDP 5.1 in this case) and talking to their system requires a whole other layer of abstraction just to transform a proper NCPDP 5.1 transmission into their broken implementation their response is literally "so?". When I ask "well what am i suppose to do with the thousands of patients that have your insurance?" they're response, "turn them away".

My team has been talking about healthcare.gov and all the related woes for a while. Pretty much we're all in agreement that we should thank the baby jeebus every day it's not our project haha. Seriously though, for something this complex, if the team grows to over about 15 people it's doomed. And that's just YOUR side, I have a lot of experience interfacing to insurance providers' systems. Half the time the provider you're trying to connect to is broken and doesn't work per their API docs at a basic level let alone have proper capacity let alone have any sense of normal connectivity. I can't even imagine trying to talk to something as huge as the IRS. I bet it's 6 months before you can get a simple spelling fix on an API method pushed out to production.

I find the technology behind HFT pretty fascinating, the level of optimization is impressive and right out there on the bleeding edge. IIRC there are switches being developed with trading algorithms right in the silicon. I just wished they had something to show for all that work. I'm perfectly ok with the levels of profit and gain but show me a widget or something of value that was produced from the labor. The usual answer you get from this question is liquidity and allocation of capital but if the inventors would be honest with themselves they would realize that's not the case. Trades happening at minute resolution by a human would provide the same level of capital allocation and liquidity as trades happening at the microsecond resolution by machines.

Found this in Wikipedia

"On July 3, 1992, a 27 mile long Rogue wave hit the Volusia County beaches. The wave's range was from Ormond Beach in the north, to New Smyrna Beach on the south. The crest was 18 feet high and centered at Daytona Beach. Sailboats crashed ashore onto cars and many people suffered cuts and bruises from glass and debris. Two people required hospitalization and 200 vehicles were damaged. 75 injuries were reported. The prevailing theory is that an underwater landslide caused the rogue wave, making this wave into a type of tsunami, although others have theorized that it was the result of a squall line."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rogue_waves

I guess it was a rogue wave..

When I was around 14 I was visiting family in Daytona Beach, we were walking on the beach at night after eating dinner listening to the waves for an hour or so then went home. Some time that night a very large wave came ashore and reached all the way up the beach past where the cars drive and where everyone sets up (umbrellas, towels, etc ). The next day, you could see how far it reached by the stains from the water in the otherwise white sand. I distinctly remember the weather man on the news saying it was possibly a "rogue" wave which was the first time I had ever heard the phrase. IIRC there were no storms that night.

Blackberry Enterprise is one of those products that I really just have to scratch my head at. It has always seemed to me that encouraging users to treat as secure something which is easily lost, stolen, or damaged is a fundamentally flawed concept for a business model. Sure, there are users out there who have a genuine need for such a concept, but the problem that really needs to be addressed is user understanding of data security practices, not giving them technology that encourages continuing bad practices in ignorance.

If you're going to make the comparison between the two download counts they need to be the same as in unique vs unique or total vs total but not total vs unique.

I'm 37 and was recently promoted from senior dev to director of our development department at my company which means I do the hiring/firing now. I think ageism is real in this industry but, at the end of the day, what matters is results. If you can write good, maintainable, best practice code and deliver on time you will always be employable. Another thing that is key is you have to be willing to learn new things and re-invent yourself as technology evolves. Don't you dare get entrenched in one language, platform, or way of doing things always try new things and approaches. When you tell yourself or someone else "well this is just the way i've always done it" that should set off an alarm.

More tactically, my advice is to read good code and talk to good developers. You can gain a lot of wisdom by just having the guts to ask, expect some odd looks given you're older but all good developers appreciate good code and will help you produce good code. If anyone gives you sh*t about your age write them off as a waste of space and go talk to someone else.

It's interesting that it can disable multiple targets, I wonder what the power requirements are. I figured the missile would detonate near the target and use the energy of the explosion to somehow how generate targeted microwaves like a shaped charge energy weapon more or less. It's on a missile because missiles are fast but I bet we see the same setup installed on drones in the near future.

"Ipad mini priced at $329 so as to avoid gutting sales of Ipad 3. Another in a string of Apple blunders. Customers will defect to Nexus 7 at $100 less or Kindle Fire also at $100 less and offering the Amazon marketplace. It's now safe to say that Apple will be looking at a minority share of the tablet market from here on in."

man what a great quote. Since when has any Apple customer cared about a price difference of $100? Just the fact that it's made of metal and not plastic is worth $100 to the average consumer's mind. Heh "string of blunders" that's freaking priceless.

Pushing to production multiple times a day sounds like code-and-fix to me. Now, promotion to UAT/Test multiple times a day sounds much more reasonable. Pushes to production should be regular and frequent but not multiple times a day. In my company, we have a couple of change windows that production pushes happen in. Most times the windows come and go with no updates but when we do have code that's ready for production we schedule it for the next available window.

I'd like to see one of these cases in detail because I can't get my mind around how an employee would feel compelled to give up their facebook (or other) private passwords to their employer. Nor can I get my mind around an employer thinking it's within their power to make such a request.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but an employee is protected by law to not even have to tell their employer if they have kids or not let alone access to private information.

What we do at my company is allow the developers to work with the project managers and deploy their applications out to a test environment for client facing review and acceptance as often as they like. This lets us do new test deployments quickly and easily with no red-tape. Once the project is a go for production then a formal request is made to move to the production server farm. The main guys in Ops, Dev, and the PM are brought into a meeting and make sure everything is taken care of ( SSL certs, DNS, monitoring, load balancing, number of nodes, etc ) then a go, no-go decision is made on the deployment. Once it's been decided that a production deployment is ready then the actual task of deploying the application is assigned to whoever wants it (usually the team lead) since the process of deploying to production is identical to deploying to test in our environments. Also, we use our continuous build server (Hudson) with a production maven profile for actually retrieving the war that is going to the server farm (i do Java web apps).

My personal preference as a sr.dev is to have other people do the deployments and verification as much as possible. It never ceases to amaze me how often over looked issues are found just because someone other than the person married to the code is doing things.

My best advice is, regardless of the size of your organization, map out a process on paper and follow it all day every day. You will appreciate the consistency when you get in those situations where a lot of balls are in the air at once.