• Betfair taps Romania for offshore software skills
  Eachan talked to Silicon.com earlier this week about the Betfair development centre that we are currently setting up in Cluj. As he says, it is going really well: the people are bright, keen and talented, we are working on some brand new products and I think it is fair to say that the work we have been doing in Cluj for the past few months has already made an impact on the way that Betfair development takes place back in London. If you are in Romania and want to see what we are up to don’t hesitate to get in touch!
• More on Google Scalability Conference
  Greg has a link to Dares reports on the Google scalability conference…
• Seattle Scalability Conference, Pt II
  … and some more from StorageMojo. Anyone else going to put something up?
• Scrum from the trenches just went payware
• Continuous Integration Server Feature Matrix

• Seattle Conference on Scalability, Pt. I
  StorageMojo’s first take on last weeks scalability conference at Google. Can’t wait to for the vids to come out.
• Joe Miller of Linden Lab speaks at the Catalyst Conference
  Jeff Barr has got some Second Life stats.

• Amazon EC2 and S3 disaster planning
  More on the Amazon SLA discussion. Artur reckons someone should compete with Amazon – I agree – competion is good. A (VERY) tongue in cheek suggestion: as this competition will be a start up, why not bootstrap it using S3 and EC2? If it takes off then you can afford to do your own thing, if it doesn’t then who cares – you don’t own the hardware.
• CFengine
  Must be going senile – never heard of CFEngine before and it seems to have been around for a while.
• Ubuntu bug number one
  lol

• Technical Debt
  Make sure you know what the interest rate is.
• Improve continuously
• The insurance point of view
  Fancy insuring the results of your development process? What would happen if we applied completion guarentees (as used in movies) to software development?
• Four hours upfront and then reevaluate
  The 37signals guys are trying out 4 hour dev cycles. Less is more I suppose.
• Second life bugs
  Ouch!

• Linux: Introducing bugs
  Torvalds tells it like it is.
• i read more blogs on tuesday
  Why don’t I get this from Bloglines?
• Amazon Web Services and the lack of a SLA
  Interesting comments from Greg Linden and Doug Kaye where they take differing views and I think they are both right. Those SLAs suck if you are trying to run a business that is succesful – +1 to Greg. The economics of EC2 make it a very cheap way of boot strapping an idea. The probability is that the idea will fail any way. +1 to Doug.
  SmugMug pdf from Greg
• WiFi: Record Range Now 382 KM
  That is a long way!

• Evaluating MapReduce for Multi-core and Multiprocessor Systems
• Google Research Labs

• How to develop software like commanding a tank
• Here, here and here
  Interesting to compare build charts from 3 different projects.

• The Importance of the environment
  Jan is right about the manual nature of deployments being the source of all evil. I am not sure about his definition of simplicity though. I would prefer to focus on making the deployment easier through automation regardless of the number of different systems. (but I agree that less is more).
• Google Scalability Conference
  I think Dan might enjoy himself.
• Cal Henderson.

Mike Cohn: Agile Estimation Bay XP Meeting, March 2007

• Part One – video
• Part Two – video