A year of hermit hacking – Pamela Fox gave one of the funniest and most personal talks I saw at FooCamp this year, but the Hangout video is tough to follow. Listen to it for the delivery, but follow along with her slides for the visuals. It captures so much of what I experienced as a lone founder, working out of a cafe is harder than you think! (Update – There's now a higher quality video available here, thanks Pamela!)
Semantic Versioning – I've realized that so much of what I love about Unix is around unenforced conventions, folk ways that have grown up spontaneously and only get documented and codified once they're widely accepted. The RFC mechanism is the most visible example of this after-the-facts approach, so I was excited to an attempt to cover how we version done in the same spirit.
Red Plenty Coda – An intriguing discussion on whether machine learning now makes central planning a workable idea. I hate the thought of that level of control myself, but it's a good reminder that information technology has repeatedly and radically changed the inventors' societies in ways they never expected.
Basic time series with Cassandra – This is a good look at the state of the art of dealing with large numbers of samples over time in a NoSQL database. For me it highlights what a gap there currently is in support for this use case. They suggest suffixing time values onto keys to create buckets of smaller time segments, and then doing a multi-get for all of the quantized values within a range. This is the best way currently available, but requires a lot of up-front knowledge about the likely distribution of your time values, and the time ranges you'll be querying over. On the other hand, I guess that's true in a bigger sense for any NoSQL data modeling.
Meglaro Escapes – There's something about my friend Matthew's combination of vintage comic strips and his own writing that makes me want to see more of it. Encourage him if you think the same!
Pete Warden's blog 