DepthCam – An open-source Kinect hack that streams live depth information to a browser using WebSockets for transport and WebGL for display. If you pick the right time of day, you'll see the researcher sipping his tea and tapping at the keyboard, in depth form!
OpenGeocoder – Steve Coast is at it again, this time with a wiki-esque approach to geocoding. You type in a query string, and if it's not found you can define it yourself. I'm obsessed with the need for an open-source geocoder, and this is a fascinating take on the problem. By doing a simple string match, rather than trying to decompose and normalize the words, a lot of the complexity is removed. This is either madness or genius, but I'm hoping the latter. The tradeoff will be completely worthwhile if it makes it more likely that people will contribute.
A beautiful algorithm – I spent many hours as a larval programmer implementing different versions of Conway's Game of Life. As I read about new approaches, I was impressed by how much difference in speed there could be between my obvious brute force implementation, and those that used insights to avoid a lot of the unnecessary work. It's been two decades since I followed the area, so I was delighted to see how far it has come. In the old days, it would take a noticeable amount of time for a large grid to go through a single generation. Nowdays "it takes a second or so for Bill Gosper’s HashLife algorithm to leap one hundred and forty-three quadrillion generations into the future". There truly is something deeply inspiring about the effort that's gone into that progress, for a problem that's never had any commercial application.
BerkeleyDB's architecture – This long-form analysis of the evolution of a database's architecture rings very true. Read the embedded design lesson boxes even if you don't have time for the whole article, they're opinionated but thoughtful and backed up with evidence in the main text.
"View naming and style inconsistencies as some programmers investing time and effort to lie to the other programmers, and vice versa. Failing to follow house coding conventions is a firing offense".
"There is rarely such thing as an unimportant bug. Sure, there's a typo now and then, but usually a bug implies somebody didn't fully understand what they were doing and implemented the wrong thing. When you fix a bug, don't look for the symptom: look for the underlying cause, the misunderstanding"
Content Creep - There's a lot to think about in this exploration of media's response to a changing world. Using the abstract word "content" instead of talking concretely about stories, articles, or blog posts seems to go along with a distant relationship with the output your organization is creating. Thinking in terms of content simplifies problems too much, so that the value of one particular piece over another is forgotten.
Pete Warden's blog 