After over 4 years at Schematic, it was time to move on. Everyone seems to be hiring like crazy these days and with some soul searching and pondering the future ™, I decided to go with an opportunity to work on the Flickr dev team. I started in June. This involved leaving my beloved New York City for the cleaner, milder, better-produce-providing and wth-is-up-with-the-weather San Francisco. (This post is late in the making mostly due to the craziness of a cross-country move and only maybe 30% laziness).

Working at Flickr so far is pretty amazing. In addition to the NY vs. SF culture shock, it seems like every day something points out how different it is to work for an agency when compared to working for a company that owns its own product. Maybe it’s just the size, too. My previous clients tended to be pretty large companies, while Flickr, even though it’s owned by the Yahoo! behemoth, is allowed to operate quite autonomously. Also, apparently Flickr is obsessed with pandas.

Small but nice changes to the blog:

• all code for the blog is now in svn.
• made updates to wordpress much easier
• using a lighter theme, which is nicer for code snippets

I’m still annoyed by how infrequently RSS widgets update, solution forthcoming.

My favorite joke today was the announcement from Mu Dynamics Research Labs that they’re moving away from NoSQL. It’s bad for startups!

Programming, especially with databases, used to be challenging. I remember having late night meetings about tables, normalization and migration and how best to represent the data we have for each packet capture. For a startup, these kinds of late night meetings are critical in establishing a bond amongst the engineers who are just learning to work with each other. NoSQL destroys this human aspect in a number of ways. more

I was (almost) worried about Xdebug no longer being free. I think this comment from Bertrand sums it up well:

Now THAT is a smart move. OSS is definitely not a way to make money. You should also definitely strengthen support for Solaris, as it being non-free again definitely means it could use a non-opensource XDebug. more

And of course, xkcd pwnd everyone today with their hardcore nerd cred:

Happy April Fools’ Day!

From findingada.com: Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do. It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited.

A lot of developers get into technology because of strong role models (anything varying from “Einstein” to “the Doc from Back to the Future” to “astronauts”). While there are many prominent male models in the tech field, it is less so for women. I do believe that one of the ways to involve women more in the community is starting to do so at a younger age (before college, before high school) and part, not all, of the appeal is having strong role models to reference.

You can help by blogging about a woman in technology on March 24th, 2010. All the cool kids are doing it! Ada wrote the first computer program (to calculate Bernoulli numbers). Do it for Ada!

Finally found some footage of the Inner Join / Outer Join database song Craig Campbell and I created for the Schematic Tech Summit in September 2008! (The contribution was: lyrics about 50/50 and 100% of music is original and written by Craig.)

Link to the footage: Inner Join / Outer Join

And the lyrics:

Craig: “Hey Maggie, I think this song’s going to be in A major…”
Maggie “Major?! but I just met’er!”

inner join outer join
do you really know the difference?
inner join outer join
a null could ruin your existence

it doesn’t matter which you choose
whichever database you use
oracle, mysql [and postgres!]
i’ve got a story i should tell
about inner and outer joins

CHORUS

do those phrases sound like gibberish
like bubbles from a talking fish?
or german or italian
or japanese or french or dutch
or maybe klingon?

CHORUS

focus on integrity
and your database will feel pretty
do you want an epic fail
or do you want your app to scale
and reach to Jupiter

where aliens can run queries
to make sure you have your foreign keys
have your ON DELETE CASCADE
relations come to aid!
your world is normalized

CHORUS x 2