The Seattle Scalability Conference was held on June 23rd in Bellevue. One person posted their notes a while back, and videos of some of the talks were recently made available. Enjoy! Scaling Google for Every User by Marissa Mayer Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets by Jeff Dean MapReduce Used on Large Data Sets by Barry [...]

I just started subscribing to Microsoft’s Job Blog – I figured it might have some info related to CareerCup (my own site related to interviewing, with lots of technical interview questions). The most recent post gives a Top 10 No-No’s when you contact a recruiter. The basic points are: Do your homework. Call with relevant [...]

So, imagine that you’re a starving child in Africa. You need food, water, medicine, and school supplies. Children all around you have died for lack of these things. Someone offers you a laptop. Yes, it was built for $150 and is therefore pretty damn cheap as far as laptops. It’s better than nothing, absolutely. It’s [...]

Last week, at lunch with two Microsoftie-friends, we got into a discussion about why there aren’t many women in Computer Science. I’ve heard so many theories, but all we really know is that there are so many factors and some of them date back to childhood. “So how’d you do it?” Jim asked, as though [...]

It seems like generally a good idea to limit the amount of snail mail you get that has sensitive information on it (social security number, bank account, etc), right? I called my bank today to ask them to stop mailing me copies of my bank statements. I don’t like snail mail in general and with [...]

Despite my best attempts to not read through my RSS feeds in morning, I stumbled across an article about 7-Eleven turning some of their stores turned into Kwik-E-Marts. Well, I was curious, so I looked up the locations on 7-Eleven’s website. Not only was there one in Seattle, but it was just a few blocks [...]

Oh Plaxo, you were so close… so close… Your syncing between Google Calendar and Outlook was great. Almost. But in the process, you’ve just spammed a whole bunch of my friends by sending out event cancellations for events that were 2+ months ago (well, let’s hope it was only prior events and not future events). [...]