And you are here why?

via SMBC

Phase 1 - You discover erlang! You get  erlang! Its glorious! Its concurrent! Its functional! There are books! All your previous code is crap! You had no idea what you were doing till now! Phase 2 - You discover OTP! You get  OTP! Its glorious! It makes writing applications so easy! You can reason about all the stuff you were doing so much easier! All your previous code is crap! You had no idea what you were doing till now! Phase 3 - You discover Common Test! You get  CT! Its glorious! It makes building reliable systems so easy! You can extend your applications into hitherto unknown realms! You can focus on the module you are working on, and not be constantly freaking out about other dependencies! All your previous code is crap! You had no idea what you were doing till now! On a bit of a serious note, CT  is what separates architects  from developers  (*). CT is when you really, really  start groking the Buddha-nature...

via CommitStrip.com

via Waldo Bronchart - this app does all the 'membering for you . Mind you, this is also a perfect example of the complete WordPerfect-ization  of these tools :-(

Throwing JSON documents into a NoSQL database is not going to automatically allow your system to scale. Corollary No, MongoDB is not  the answer. Note OK, MongoDB is  pretty good from a prototyping perspective, but it will  end up biting you in the butt... In fact, the general response for anything  other than prototyping should really be in two parts " Do you really know what you are doing?" " No you don't ." I'm getting pretty seriously curmudgeonly about this nowadays (" Get off my lawn" , etc.).  People probably shouldn't be using anything NoSQL  at all - they invariably end up shooting themselves in the foot...

Don't believe me? Check out this awesome correlation! And since correlation implies causation, it must be true! This, and other spectacular spurious correlations  are available at TylerVigen.com Be thrilled at the link between Dying by becoming tangled in their bedsheets  and the Number of lawyers in Georgia Marvel at the correlation between the  US spending on science, space, and technology and the Number of lawyers in Tennessee ! Remember kids, you too can practice bad science with the best of them!

And if they persist, " Chicago! " via PVP Thankfully, it is a lot  less common nowadays. Mind you, the fact that I live in New York probably helps...

The Moustache of Understanding has nowhere to go but down after this magnificent ending to this weeks opus Our biggest problem, though, is not Europe or Obama. Our biggest problem is us and our own political paralysis. The world takes America seriously when they see us doing big hard things together — when we lead by example. If we want to do more nation-building abroad, then we have to come together on a plan to do more nation-building at home first ... That’s how we build our muscle and weaken Putin’s. What is most scary to me about the world today is the fact that we are doing neither smart nation-building abroad to make the world more stable nor smart nation-building at home to make America more resilient and strong. We need both to be safe. We need more leverage from nation-building at home to have the staying power to lift others, but we also need those foreigners to provide a solid, unified foundation so our leverage can work. It’s hard to replace a flat tire, when your j...

Yeah, theres plenty of literature on this - heck, most (all?) religions eventually devolve to some variations on the theme of Being Good. But that, really isn't my point here - its more about the impact of Doing The Right Thing in your professional life. In any job, there is always the inevitable urge to game the system , viz., figuring out how to not just do your job, but do it in a way that diminishes the others that you work with.  Cutthroat Capitalism seems to have become almost a mantra these days - with the implicit assumption being that the only way you can win is by having others lose. The thing is, gaming the system takes brain-power . Early on in your career, the type of tasks you get are ones that you can take care of pretty easily, while still having brain-power left over to game the system . However, as your career progresses, you'll increasingly find yourself in situations where it takes all your available brain-power to take care of your tasks - th...

And there are many things of Steel out there. There is the Shaq of Steel The Man of Steel and, of course, there is the MAN of Steel! Happy 11th "Mission Accomplished" Anniversary everyone!   May your cod-pieces be as worthy as the ones above!