Thursday, June 23, 2011

The origin of the WOM - the "Write Only Memory"

The origin of the WOM - the "Write Only Memory": "An engineer at Signetics, frustrated by the long and useless sequence of approvals for data sheets (during which no actual checking occurred), once made up a spec for a 'Write Only Memory' (a 'WOM') and sent it along with a batch of other data sheets to be approved. After all, if you are selling 'Read Only Memories', why not have a 'Write Only Memory'? It's perfectly logical - - which is why the managers saw nothing wrong with the data sheet."

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Asciiflow - ASCII Flow Diagram Tool

Asciiflow - ASCII Flow Diagram Tool:

   __ ____ ____ _ _ ____ _____ _ __ BETA!
   / \ | ___|| ___||_||_| / ___|| | _ | \ __ / /
  / /\ \|_ \ | | _ _ / / | | | | | |\ \/ \/ /
 / __ \_\ \ | |__ | || |/ __| | |_| |_| | \ /
/__/ \__\___||____||_||_|_/ |____|____| \_/\_/

Monday, June 13, 2011

Peter's blog: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.

Peter's blog: It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.: "As a senior developer I get asked sometimes if constant change of technology is making me, well, obsolete. Personally I don't have problem with high pace of new technologies coming. I actually enjoy learning new stuff.

But the question remains: how do developers cope with onslaught of new technologies with age?

This kind of data is hard to come by, but thanks to almighty Stackoverflow ands their wise decision (thanks Joel), to make this data publicly available we can mine this data to our collective benefit.

With a simple bash script to download the data, a small Java program to extract the stats and Google Docs to make the graphs, I was able to produce some interesting stats.

I pulled in data of about 70.000 developers whose Stackoverflow reputation is over 100. On average 53% of them have their age listed in their profiles. So the sample was 37.400 users."