It’s been almost 20 years since IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer beat the reigning world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, for the first time under standard tournament rules. Since then, chess-playing computers have become significantly stronger, leaving the best humans little chance even against a modern…

Getty Images How big is Google? We can answer that question in terms of revenue or stock price or customers or, well, metaphysical influence. But that’s not all. Google is, among other things, a vast empire of computer software. We can answer in terms of code. Google’s Rachel Potvin came pretty…

No, I Am Not Crowdfunding This Baby (an open letter to a worried fan) How I’m slightly terrified of the oncoming mix of motherhood and art….and how judging and terrifying me further isn’t going to help me. *Note: this is my first piece of writing on Medium. I’m really happy to be here, I think this…

At Facebook we strive for our apps to be stable, fast, and reliable. We've worked hard to reduce the number of crashes in the Facebook iOS app and to increase its overall reliability. In the past, most of the crashes have been due to programmatic errors, and they always came with a stack trace that…

On trying to sort out what it means to find success and happiness. There’s been a lot of talk this week about Work-Life balance, pushing employees too far, and the like in the wake of the NYTimes expose about practices at Amazon . Whether you’re on the defense or the offense of this specific reveal,…

Principal Component Analysis and Fashion Any set of images can be broken down with Principal Component Analysis . This has been done pretty successfully with faces . Here we’ll take a look at style. Our dataset is 807 pictures of dresses from Amazon. They have a standard image size, but…

N ineteen stories up in a Brooklyn office tower, the view from Manuela Veloso’s office—azure skies, New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty—is exhilarating. But right now we only have eyes for the nondescript windows below us in the tower across the street. In their panes, we can see chairs, desks,…

There’s an all-too-common cycle in tech these days. Startup avoids management. Founder makes all the decisions. Startup gets traction. Hiring takes off. Management is suddenly needed. Founder turns to his best engineer: “I’m drowning. Can you manage this team for me?" David Loftesness , Twitter’s…

Perhaps you heard recently about a new algorithm that can drive a car ? Or invent a recipe? Or scan a picture and find your face in a crowd? It seems as though every week companies are finding new uses for algorithms that adapt as they encounter new data. Last year Wired quoted an ex-Google employee…

After working for a long time on many different distributed systems, you learn to appreciate how complicated the littlest things can become. For example, when running an application on a local machine, changing configuration of an application involves clicking on a gui or, at worst, editing a file…

It’s unfortunate, the way news is consumed and interpreted in the age of twitter. Everyone feels tremendous pressure to form an opinion quickly and state it loudly and with certainty. Once this has been done, people are highly resistant to changing their minds and they become impervious to new…

This is an edited and expanded transcript of a talk I gave at Strange Loop 2014 . The video recording (embedded below) has been watched over 8,000 times. For those of you who prefer reading, I thought it would be worth writing down the talk. Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the…

Image Credit: Tom Wang / Shutterstock I just spent a day working with Bob, the Chief Innovation Officer of a very smart large company I’ll call Acme Widgets. Bob summarized Acme’s impediments to innovation. “At our company we have a culture that fears failure. A failed project is considered a…

Ten years ago today, Google Maps launched to the world. When it was born, it was a paper atlas in living form, with no pages to turn. Instead of online mapping leader MapQuest’s printable list of directions, navigation routes were overlaid on top of the map itself. And Google Maps loaded map tiles…

What’s in an IPO? My experiences through GrubHub’s offering from start to finish Posted by on February 9, 2015 in Defining Success | The morning of the IPO at the corner of Wall & Broad I’m pretty stoked. The morning of the IPO at the corner of Wall & Broad Dude in a Pizza suit proves the NYSE’s…

If you’ve been watching our GitHub wiki , following us on Twitter , or reading the wikitech-l mailing list , you’ve probably known for a while that Wikipedia has been transitioning to HHVM. This has been a long process involving lots of work from many different people, and as of a few weeks ago, all…

Writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2012, Timothy Messer-Kruse described his failed efforts to penetrate Wikipedia’s gravitational field. He begins: For the past 10 years I’ve immersed myself in the details of one of the most famous events in American labor history, the Haymarket riot…

Early encounters with the internet Context Collapse, Architecture, and Plows Women and the Internet: Part Two This is part two of a four-part series. Part One , Part Three , Part Four . Technology changes everything. I dance with the trolls, and I enjoy it. I have some wonderfully sketchy internet…

A View from Emerging Technology from the arXiv If you prefer beautiful routes over short ones, GPS mapping algorithms are of little use. But Yahoo researchers have come up with an approach that could change that. July 8, 2014 The way we navigate in cities has been revolutionized in the last few…

Disruption is a theory of change founded on panic, anxiety, and shaky evidence. Credit Illustration by Brian Stauffer In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and…

“Work hard, play hard” is such a common descriptor for corporate culture that there’s a Wikipedia article about it. It captures an idea that is essential to the modern technology industry — that while companies ask a lot of their employees, they reward them with perks that more than make up for it.…

Authentication Cargo Cults Decrufting Account UX The UX conventions related to user accounts are so well established that their meanings have been lost. New apps reimplement the conventions without adapting them to their own needs. Developers are unable to recognize and improve on suboptimal ways of…

Martin Fowler From time to time, I've written on this site about the problematic DiversityImbalance in the software development profession, and how we need to take deliberate action to increase the proportion of underrepresented groups. This is all well and good, but naturally leads to the questions…

How Much My Novel Cost Me Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent Leah Goren IT’S HARD TO WRITE ABOUT BEING BROKE because brokeness is so relative; “broke” people run the gamut from the trust-funded jerk whose drinks you buy because she’s “so broke…

Once upon a time, I graduated from Howard University with a degree in computer science and no clue about running a business beyond Paul Graham’s constant exhortation, “Build something people want.” I did a poor job remembering to call my hairstylist, and since I was graduating with a degree in…