Innovators (Book Review)

11/02/14 • -1 min

Walter Isaacson follows his biography of Steve Jobs with another great book. This one does not focus on any particular individual, but rather starts with Ada Lovelace and flows through time, up to the present, spotlighting each of the innovators that played a part in laying the foundation for, and ultimately creating, the digital revolution. In this episode, we briefly review this new book.
Listen to hear how many thumbs up this book received from Bett and Russ.
Listen now: (download)
References:
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Previous Episode

Mud Wrestling with Greg Young

Listen to this episode to hear how wallowing around in many small balls of mud can help avoid the classic big ball of mud--and ultimately enable you too to practice "the art of destroying software".
Turns out the key to writing great software starts with planning upfront to destroy it. In this episode, Greg shares many insights, with the main insight being that we have all been overlooking one key "-ility". That is, is delete-ability of code. And while some of you might argue the ideas are not new, Greg's way of presenting them definitely is.
Listen now: (download)
References:
Greg's blog: http://goodenoughsoftware.net/
Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World by Joe Armstrong
Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!: A Beginner's Guide by Fred Hebert
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr
Parallel Distributed Processing, Volume 1 By David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland and PDP Research Group

Next Episode

Good at Architecture or Coding? Compete to Prove It!

So you think you are good at coding or architecture? Here's your chance to learn how to prove it to the world through coding competitions like Top Coder. And yes, there are competitions oriented toward architecture, too.
Douglas Woolley has competed in these competitions and joins Bett and Russ to share some stories about competitions along with information about how you can get involved.
Listen now: (download)
References:
•Facebook Hacker Cup: https://www.facebook.com/hackercup •Google Code Jam:http://code.google.com/codejam •TopCoder (USA based): http://community.topcoder.com/tc •CodeForces (Russian based):http://codeforces.com / •Code Chef (India based):http://www.codechef.com / •UVa Online Judge: http://uva.onlinejudge.org / •HackerRank: https://www.hackerrank.com/ •Sphere Online Judge (SPOJ):http://www.spoj.com/problems/classical/