Adam Flaherty

Passionate Programmers, Bitcoin APIs, WebOps Risk Management, and @WarrenBuffet

Weekly highlights and insights: May 27-31

A Commencement Speech for 2013 CS Majors: Being passionate about software is critical to success.

Bitcoin as a money platform: Andreas Antonopoulos outlines Bitcoin network’s three distinct APIs.

What Is the Risk That Amazon Will Go Down (Again)?: Johan Bergström explores WebOps risk management.

Where’s @WarrenBuffet?: Social media pull does not equate to a sound investment strategy.

In-Memory Databases, Burning Silos, Reintroducing Dart, and Google Glass Gatherings

Weekly Highlights and Insights: May 19-25

In-memory Databases: A discussion of near real-time manipulation of massive datasets

Burning the Silos: Minimize boundaries to reduce product cycle times.

Dart Is Not the Language You Think It Is: Seth Ladd’s enthusiastic reintroduction of Dart prompts a voluminous discussion on Slashdot.

Is that the Google Glass?: The anthropology of an always-on society

Tracing the Disappeared: An interactive visualization of CIA rendition flights

Google I/O, Big Data Adolescence, Visualization, and the Future of Open Source

Weekly Highlights and Insights: May 13-17

Google I/O: O’Reilly Editor Rachel Roumeliotis reports from the conference floor.

Big Data, Cool Kids: Fumbling toward the adolescence of big data tools.

Code as Art: Interactive Data Visualization for the Web author Scott Murray on becoming a code artist.

Real-time World-wide Wikipedia Edits: Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi’s addictive visualization.

Future of Open Source: The quality, security, and community driving open source adoption.

Weekly Highlights and Insights: May 6-10

Fit2Cure, unit testing core data, data skepticism, mobile casual gaming market, and the beehive fence

Fit2CureScreenshot

Fit2Cure: Andy Oram introduces a game that crowdsources the search for drugs to cure under-researched diseases of developing countries.

Unit testing core data: James Turner shows iOS developers a less painful way to set up an OCUnit project to test code that uses Core Data.

Even more data skepticism: Beau Cronin and Mike Loukides continue to weigh in on the dangers of blindly copying data collection and analysis methods.

Developing mobile casual games: Jesse Freeman on the impact of HTML5 on game development and the mobile casual gaming market.

Beehive fence saves African elephants: Lucy King’s inventive fence exploits an elephant’s fear of bees to save lives and crops.

Weekly Highlights and Insights: April 29-May 3

Leading indicators, CSS selectors, medical data sharing, DDoS visualization, and a new jQuery class

Leading Indicators: Over on O’Reilly Radar, Mike Loukides and Q Ethan McCallum come up with a few ideas for evaluating an organization’s data science program from the “outside.”

CSS Selectors as Superpowers: Simon St. Laurent hopes that “the success of CSS selectors will bring developers to look for other ways to apply pattern-matching to their markup.”

Data sharing drives diagnoses and cures, if we can get there (Parts 1 & 2): Andy Oram explores the take-aways from this year’s Sage Congress.

Visualization of the Week: Jenn Webb shows us Ludovic Fauvet’s Logstalgia visualization of a recent VideoLAN DDoS attack.

jQuery for Advanced Front-End Development: New jQuery class from O’Reilly School of Technology.

Weekly Highlights and Insights

Stop standardizing HTML, persistence of plastic, social media's 2.0 moment, map of U.S. terror attacks 1970-2011

Stop standardizing HTML: Simon St. Laurent writes “HTML itself is still useful—many people and tools know how to read and write it—but there is less and less reason to let the HTML vocabulary be a cage limiting our possibilities.” His unique take on the issue prompted an uproar on Slashdot.

The persistence of plastic: Did you know that plastic production during the past decade equals that of the entire twentieth century?

Agile in name only: James Turner calls out companies that claim to embrace agile development, but don’t really understand it. Is agile really agile if you end up going over a waterfall at the end?

Social media’s 2.0 moment: Over on O’Reilly Radar Joshua-Michéle Ross wonders if apps like SnapChat and Poke are creating a massive acceleration in the traditional timeline needed to create branded content.

Visualization of the Week: Gain some perspective and cut through the jungle canopy that is the 24/7 news cycle. Using START Global Terrorism Database, the Guardian’s Simon Rogers mapped every U.S. terror attack between 1970 and 2011.