Paul Graham has some great essays online that made up the content of his book: Hackers & Painters. One of my favorite posts is The Python Paradox, which presents something rather counterintuitive at first read:

"I'll call it the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job.

This concept may be a little scary to some. Learning an esoteric language improves your chances at getting a "good" job? (presumably "good" meaning one you like) But what about all the recruiters salivating for Java/JEE and .NET programmers?

// Deletes files that are no longer reachable via our storage system's
// metadata.
class FileCleaner {
public:
  class Env {
  public:
    virtual bool MatchFiles(const char* pattern, vector* filenames) = 0;
    virtual bool BulkDelete(const vector& filenames) = 0;
    virtual MetadataReader* NewMetadataReader() = 0;
    virtual ~Env();
  };
  // Constructs a FileCleaner. Uses “env” to access files and metadata.
  FileCleaner(Env* env, QuotaManager* qm);
  // Deletes files that are not reachable via metadata.
  // Returns true on success.
  bool CleanOnce();
};

Pylot (my web performance test tool) and WebInject (my web functional test tool) were both just named on the "List of top web application load and stress test tools" from WarePrise.

In No More Iterations I showed our 1^st attempt at a kanban board. Now that we have a little more experience I'd like to show you where we are now and where we stopped on the way.