The video below is of Leo Laporte blowing up at Mike Arrington on the Gillmor Gang questioning a positive review because Leo got a free phone. Well, valid question if you ask me. For example, Leo’s audible.com ads on the TWIT podcasts have tuned into live banter between his collegues where they all love the service. I have no idea if that is real or an advertisement. Some transparency would be nice.
Well, there is no turning back now. I’m all signed up for the 2nd half of the San Francisco Half Marathon on July 26th. Let’s be clear here — I’ve lived a fairly sedentary lifestyle and getting this out of shape body to run 13.1 miles (21,097.5 meters) is big deal! Here are a few things I’ve learned with my training thus far …
I’ll let you know how the rest of my training goes. Good luck to me — I’ll need it!
Here are a few articles from this week that I found interesting:
This was my first year at Google I/O and I have to say that it was well worth the $300.
This is starting to turn into a Apple’s WWDC conference. Nice job Google.
Below is the company wide email from Steve Ballmer about the upcoming release of Bing.
From: Steve Ballmer [mailto:Steve.Ballmer@microsoft.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 28, 2009 11:30 AM
To: Microsoft – All Employees (QBDG)
Subject: Announcing Bing
Today, at the D Conference in Carlsbad, CA, I’m announcing the release of Bing, our new search engine. This is an important milestone for Microsoft as search is a critical business for us and Bing is a significant step forward in redefining search and expanding our share of the online advertising market. But Bing is just the start. We know this is a journey that will require a long-term commitment to hard work and investment in innovation in order to be successful.
We have always believed that search offers huge opportunities for innovation. Currently, only one in four searches succeeds on the first try. And while search is pretty good for navigating the Web, it’s not good at helping people use the Web to accomplish more complicated decision-based tasks.
With Bing, our goal is to do more than just make it easier for people to find information. Today, we’re delivering a powerful set of tools that will enable people to make faster, more informed decisions.
In short, Bing is a decision engine that goes beyond what people have come to think of as search—and what our competitors offer today.
A new search product requires a name that clearly signals the arrival of something unique. We chose Bing because it’s short, memorable, and symbolic of the moment when information and opportunity come together and a simple search becomes an engine for taking action.
Today, we’ll begin launching Bing internally so Microsoft employees can have an exclusive preview. You’ll find improvements that showcase innovative engineering work, including tools that automatically organize, refine, and anticipate searches. We’re also delivering strong innovation in shopping, local search, travel, and health—the areas where people want to use the Web to help them make decisions that are important to their lives.
Next week, Bing will go live outside Microsoft at bing.com. I urge you to let your friends and family know that we have created a powerful new search engine that brings fresh innovation to their Web experience.
To learn more about Bing, please join Online Services Division President Qi Lu and me in Café RedWest on June 11 at 9:00am Pacific Daylight Time for an employee Town Hall. The event will also be webcast through the Employee Town Hall website. If you have questions, please send them in advance to execqa@microsoft.com.
Steve
Good luck Microsoft — you have a long way to go.
It’s been over a decade since my work experience at Scient and what a great experience it was.
The national unemployment rate is 8.5% according to March 2009 report released by the Bureau of Labor. In the state of California, unemployment is at 10.5%. The amazing thing is that even under these conditions I find it very difficult to consistently find good software engineering talent. I had to think about why and came up with a few observations.
The recruiting process is inefficient — I get 6 -10 cold recruiter calls a day telling me that they have the perfect engineer for me regardless of the fact that they have no idea what my company does or what I’m looking for. They actually started randomly visiting the office now. I get at least 2 -3 random visits a month. I post a job on Monster.com, Dice.com or CraigsList.org and I get flooded with random resumes — almost too many for me to even go through. Once your network runs dry — it seems that using an expensive 3rd party recruiter is the only way to go. The means in which we connect hiring managers with perspective workers needs to get better.
Software engineers not prepared for the next generation of problems to solve – One of my areas of expertise is building platform teams and finding the talent to do so is difficult. Most software engineers have been cornered into using a set of technologies that are meant to make their lives easier by abstracting the lower level details. This results in many engineers that are experts of a framework but do not have the skills on their own to build their own software infrastructure. Cloud computing is bringing forth the problem – pushing software into a more centralized, mult-processor problem. Experience building complex multi-threaded software infrastucture is rare. Well, what about the introduction of multi-core processors? This changes the game at an even more fundamental level. What are we going to do with all the code that doesn’t take advantage of multi-processor hardware? Uh!
Is the US not producing enough engineering talent? — This topic seems to be under debate but I do know that 4/5 resumes I get are from non-US engineers. Nothing wrong with that — I’ve hired from all over the world and outsourced in all parts of the world. However, as a father, I hope that there are educational programs are in place to encourage kids to consider engineering diciplines.
The bottom line is that I guess life is good if you’re a good software engineer.
I just signed up for the upcoming Google I/O Developer Conference @ Moscone Center May 27th and 28th. For $300 bucks how can you go wrong? Most conferences are well over $2000.
If you plan to attend, let me know and we’ll grab some drinks after the show.
I’ve had the Amazon Kindle 2 for just over a month now and its about time I jot down a few notes about my experience. Here are the things I like …
Here are things I don’t like:
Overall, I’m a fan and would recommend it to others.
Well, it’s been a while since I posted to my blog — this seems to happen when i start a new job. At the end of last year, I joined DigitalGlobe as their Director, Software Engineering running their office in Walnut Creek. DigitalGlobe is the world’s leading provider of high resolution commercial imagery and the only company operating a constellation of sub-meter commercial imaging satellites. You probably have recogized some of DigitalGlobe’s imagery within Google Earth and Google Maps. Here is a link of my old home in Connectitcut with some of our imagery. The lake labeled Candee’s Pond which resides on our property was actually renamed “Renato’s Lake” when I was 8 years old. I guess the town had not updated their records yet.
In more recent events, DigitalGlobe satellites captured the North Korean rocket launch in mid-flight. Here is a large image and here is a large overview image, both of them available on the company website.
I would tell write about what I’m working on but I would need to kill you. In all seriousness, its probably one of the most unique challenges I’ve ever faced building software and wow, is it cool stuff. You’ll hear more about it in the coming months.
