Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2. Building Products

Hackathons and 20% time

According to this article, Google’s 20% time never really existed. I’ve always guessed as much, joking with Google friends that their 20% time really could only be taken on Saturday and Sunday. Which is all the same: Engaged employees do what they feel needs to be done no matter what and when. Hackathons, however, exist.…

2015-01-16
Which design patterns should be retired? (In defense of singleton)

Addison-Wesley asked the patterns community (or at least those who were there at the beginning) about their opinion on various issues. This is the second post of what should have been three (though I probably will only get to the first two). For this very specific question, I expect everyone to say: Retire Singleton! I…

2014-10-28
First thoughts on the 20 year anniversary of the design patterns book (a.k.a. GoF book)

Addison Wesley is going to celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the Design Patterns a.k.a. Gang-of-Four book. For this, they reached out to the community and asked for contributions. Here are the questions they asked, suggesting we ask (and answer) our own ones as well: I’ll provide my answers to questions 1-4 here and I’ll…

2014-10-28
Fine-grained change detection in structured text documents [DocEng 2014]

Abstract Detecting and understanding changes between document revisions is an important task. The acquired knowledge can be used to classify the nature of a new document revision or to support a human editor in the review process. While purely textual change detection algorithms offer fine-grained results, they do not understand the syntactic meaning of a…

2014-09-16
System efficiency vs. fragility

I just listened to Padmasree Warrior on a Commonwealth Club podcast. Ms Warrior is the chief strategy officer at Cisco. The podcast contains lots of interesting insights and projections (as well as some incorrect statements, specifically that Google was the first search engine company and capitalized on a first-mover advantage). With Cisco being about all…

2014-04-21
Looking for simple examples of product management failures and challenges

I’m looking for simple examples of product management failures and challenges that I can use in teaching our product management course. Photos or short stories would be great. To give you an idea of what I’m after, here are three examples. Unmaintainable teacup This unmaintainable cup with saucer is probably a best seller, but I’d…

2014-01-02