The decade in review

I just happened to notice that the 10-year blogaversary for this low-volume property had passed in April without recognition. So, belatedly, here’s the first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each year from this blog:

• 9 April 2007: I've just downloaded the FogBugz for Visual Studio 2005 plugin, and I'm taking it for a spin.
• 11 January 2008: The Economist brings its customary skeptical perspective to the software-as-a-service market.
• 8 January 2009: Ashlee Vance introduces the open-source statistical analysis programming environment R, one that challenges proprietary packages.
• 10 January 2010: Junk Charts provides some how-I-did-it code in the statistical programming language R.
• 12 January 2011: Michael Donohoe describes an update [to the] New York Times's Emphasis feature, which enables readers and bloggers to deep link to individual paragraphs within a story.
• 9 January 2012: "I decided to follow the single-letter style and called it C, leaving open the question whether the name represented a progression through the alphabet or through the letters in BCPL."
• 7 January 2013: Aaron Souppouris gets a quick look at the XO-4 convertible at CES.
• 2 January 2014: As product owner Patrick Cooper explains in an unusually frank post, our launch a couple of weeks ago was actually our second try.
• 2 January 2015: Sylvia Tippmann offers a brief introduction for scientists to the programming language R and its ecosystem.
• 11 January 2016: Dalmeet Singh Chawla introduces Depsy, a service that seeks to measure the contributions made by researchers to the body of software that powers science.
• 30 January 2017: Antonia Cereijido and Alina Selyukh ask, "Why Aren't There More Women in Tech?"

Despite what you might infer from this selection drawn at random (without replacement), this blog is more than just about R.

Worth it

Janice Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele, a name for database schema and user experience designers to reckon with.

Kafkaesque

Boerge Svingen walks us through the log-based architecture that powers digital publishing at the New York Times. Now that we are in the era where disk isn't just cheap, it's effectively free, a storage-heavy approach like this can make sense.

Timing

A good interview question: give your prospect the setup described by Jane Bailey in "Time to Transfer," and cut off the answer after this text:

The logic was still in place. In fact, the logs showed that the data hadn't been moved until 5 minutes after it was marked to be moved. But the confirmation page had generated in mere seconds. How could this possibly have occurred?

"It just doesn't make sense," she complained to her coworker.

Give your prospect a point for each possible (even impossible) explanation of the defect.

K-sortable

Rick Branson, "A Brief History of the UUID."