- Amazon Sold 158 Items/Second on Cyber Monday (TechCrunch) — I remember when 20 hits/s on a Sun web server was considered pretty friggin’ amazing. Just pause a moment and ponder the infrastructure Amazon has marshaled to be able to do this: data centers, replication, load balancers, payment processing, fulfillment, elastic cloud computing, storage servers, cheap power, bandwidth beyond comprehension.
- Quick Thoughts on Pinboard (Matt Haughey) — thoughtful comments, and an immediate and just as thoughtful response. (I am a happy pinboard user who is also looking forward to the social networking features to come)
- Female Founders — impressively long list of female startup founders. (via Hacker News)
- Less Framework — cross-device css grid system based on using inline media queries. (via Pinboard)
"womenintech" entries
Would I attend my own conference?
Why conferences need more diversity.
Conferences that want to be taken seriously by people who take other kinds of people seriously need more diversity among the speakers.
Four short links: 28 December 2010
Amazon Records, Social Bookmarking, Female Founders, and CSS Framework
Women helping women get into tech
Sara Chipps on IT education and how women are navigating the tech world.
Computer science programs have an iffy track record recruiting women into the tech space. Sara Chipps, co-founder of Girl Develop IT, has a new approach: create an inclusive environment where dumb questions are encouraged and practical application is key. In this Q&A, Chipps discusses her project and the pressures women face in the tech world.
Four short links: 28 July 2010
End of Open Phones, More Geek Women, Social-ish Teenagers, and Premium Cycles
- The end of the road for the Nexus One (LWN) — The pessimistic among us can be forgiven for concluding that the battle for open handsets is being lost. The carriers determine which devices will be successful in the market, and they have absolutely no interest in openness. Customers are irresistibly drawn to heavily advertised, shiny devices with low up-front costs; they just do not see any reason to insist on more open devices or, even, freedom from carrier lock-in. Attempts to create a market in open handsets – Nexus One, OpenMoko – seem to go down in flames. By this reasoning, we may well all be using Linux-based handsets in the future, but the freedom that attracted many of us to Linux will have been lost. (via Hacker News)
- Women in Technology — says almost everything I learned from helping women into O’Reilly conferences. Amen!
- Teenagers and Social Participation (Nina Simone) — [M]any older visitors enjoy the vibrancy of social events and are more than willing to share stories with other visitors in the context of a museum experience as long as it isn’t overly technology mediated. There is another, surprising group that is much less likely to participate in dialogue with strangers: teenagers.
- Three New Features for Reddit Gold — I’ve been watching this with interest. They asked supports to sign up to subscription program before they said what they’d offer in return. Now they’re developing premium features to see what sticks. They’re offering the ability to turn off ads, no surprise there, but also some features (such as resortable lists) that are computationally expensive. I like the idea of offering subscribers the expensive-to-compute services above and beyond freemium.
At the Forefront of the Next Industrial Revolution
I chose Limor Fried, founder and chief engineer of Adafruit Industries, as the subject of my post for Ada Lovelace Day for four reasons: Limor is a hardware engineer – one of those bastions of tech in which it's most important for young girls considering future careers to understand that women can excel. Here's Limor, making adjustments to the pick…