Latest in Industry and Research Publications
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I want my computer to be as easy to use as my rice cooker
There is a (by now oldish) saying, attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup: I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone. I used to riff on this with the following variant: For…
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The looming bubble in Lego bricks
In 2014, for a course that teaches students teamwork, I bought 20 sets of basic lego bricks for a bridge building exercise. The cost per set was 20 Euro. This year the number of students in our project courses exceeded what could be done with this basic set of legos and so I looked to…
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The Internet is eating the things
A lot of my industry talks emphasize the value of software over hardware because of the significantly higher speed of innovation. In a well run continuous software engineering (DevOps) organization, you can go from commit to production within seconds. Try that with hardware! The feedback you can gather from customers and the market is at…
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Software is eating the world auf Deutsch
My university is preparing a bid for a major (fairly broad) German computer science conference. We are wondering how one would translate Marc Andreesen’s diktum “software is eating the world” into German. Software verschlingt die Welt? Naja. Vorschläge gern gesehen, Kommentare auch.
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Farewell, my first-Gen OnePlus
This is my first-generation OnePlus. I dropped it and now it is broken. You may notice that I marked it up as China only, which means that I would use it in Mainland China only. I travel a lot to the PRC and the first time I brought this OnePlus and put in a Chinese…
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Current open source publications of general interest
Preparing for the relaunch of my course on free/libre, and open source software, I took stock of the general-interest papers I wrote about open source. From this list, I’m omitting (overly) academic papers; all of these papers should be broadly understandable. Introduction to open source Open source and intellectual property Open source project communities Open…