Titles and Promotions (Ben Horowitz) — Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible. The hierarchy should have Presidents, Chiefs, and Senior Executive Vice Presidents. If it makes people feel better, let them feel better. Titles cost nothing. Better yet, when competing for new employees with other companies, using Andreessen’s method you can always outbid the competition in at least one dimension.
Android’s Linux Copyrights Issue — Google copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 Linux kernel header files with a homemade program that drops source code comments and some other elements, and daringly claims (in a notice at the start of each generated file) that the extracted material constitutes “no copyrightable information”
errbit — open source self-hosted error catcher, an open source alternative to HopToad. (via Glen Barnes)
Drizzle: From What If to What Has (Brian Aker) — fantastic retrospective of lessons learned in the shipping of Drizzle. We have fixed all the warnings in Drizzle. This is something that isn’t sexy work, and the only way it is justified is because cleaning up warnings fixes bugs. If you are starting a new code base let me implore upon on you the necessity of doing this from the beginning. They sweat the dull stuff that matters, not just the shiny sexy featureitis.
