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A review of Lambda School from the father of a recent graduate

Background I’ve been a professional developer for twenty years.  I exposed my son N to programming a couple times while he was growing up --  Scratch when he was around 8, Khan Academy javascript when he was 12.  He learned it easily enough but it didn’t grab him. But his junior year in high school he had a hole in his schedule and I convinced him to try AP CS to fill it.  And this time, he got hooked.  He started programming for fun in the evenings.  You know how it goes. Then in March 2020, Covid hit and his high school went virtual.  It was a terrible experience, to the point that instead of going back for more his senior year, he took the last classes he needed to graduate over the summer, and decided to apply to programming boot camps in the fall.  I think the American college system is broken , so I was happy to help evaluate his options for something different. Evaluating boot camps N and I came up with three criteria for evaluating boot camps.  If they didn’t meet these three,
Recent posts

Speaking to a technical conference

I just got back from PyCon, and as with all conferences where the talks are delivered by engineers instead of professional speakers, we had a mixed bag. Some talks were great; others made me get my laptop out . The most important important axiom is: a talk is not just an essay without random access. It's a different medium. Respect its strengths instead of wishing it were something it's not. Here are some concrete principles that can help: Don't read your slides Advice often repeated, too-seldom followed. This is sometimes phrased as "make eye contact with your audience," but I've seen that second version interpreted to mean, "make eye contact while reading your slides, so your head pops up and down like a gopher poking out of its hole." So just don't read your slides, no matter what else you're doing. Some good presenters go to extremes with this, with just one or two words per slide. This is fine as a stylistic embellishment, b

Thinkpad 420s review

In the last three years my primary machines have run OS X, Linux, Windows, OS X, and now Windows again, in that order. The observant reader may note, "That's a lot of machines in three years." It is, but I also changed jobs twice in that time frame, so that's part of it. Another part is that I'm a bit rough with laptops; the two mac machines broke badly enough that AppleCare told me they weren't going to help. The Dell and Lenovo machines, though, outlasted my use of them. For this most recent machine, I had several requirements and several nice-to-haves, some of which were in tension. Requirements: Able to drive a 30" external monitor At least 8GB of RAM At least 1440x900 native resolution Nice to have: Smaller than my 15" macbook pro, which is too large to use comfortably in coach on an airplane Larger screen than my wife's 13.3" mbp A "real" cpu, not the underclocked ones in the Macbook Airs A graphics card that c

On applying for jobs

A friend asks , If [I see a] job I could do, even though I don't meet the stated requirements, should I apply anyway? Short answer: yes. Longer answer: companies are all over the map here, although in general the less layers of bureaucracy there are between the team that the candidate will work with and the hiring process, the more likely the list of requirements is to be actual requirements. How can you tell? HR paper pushers like to think in terms of checklists because that lets them go through hundreds of resumes without any real understanding of the position, so they write ads like this one -- lots of really specific "5+ years of X," not much about what the position actually involves. But if it's the team lead himself writing the description, which you will see at smaller companies, then you get much more about what the position involves and less checklist items, because the lead is comfortable determining competence based on skill instead of p

Apache Cassandra: 2010 in review

In 2010, Apache Cassandra increased its momentum as the leading scalable database. Here is a summary of the notable activity in three areas: code, community and controversy. As always, comments are welcome. Code 2010 started with the release of Cassandra 0.5 , followed by 0.6 and graduation from the ASF incubator a few months later. Seven more stable releases of 0.6 proceeded, adding many features to improve operations in response to feedback from production users. 0.7 adds highly anticipated features like column value indexes , live schema updates , more efficient cluster expansion, and more control over replication, but didn't quite make it into 2010, with rc4 released on new year's 2011 . We also committed the distributed counters patchset, begun at Digg and enhanced by Twitter for their real-time analytics product . Notable as the most-involved feature discussion to date, distributed counters started with a vector clock approach , but switched to a new desig

And now for something completely different

A month ago I left Rackspace to start Riptano , a Cassandra support and services company. I was in the unusal position of being a technical person looking for a business-savvy co-founder. For whatever reason, the converse seems a lot more common . Maybe technical people tend to sterotype softer skills as being easy. But despite some examples to the contrary (notably for me, Josh Coates at Mozy ), I found that starting a company is too hard for just one person . Unfortunately, all of my fairly slim portfolio of business guys I'd like to co-found with were unavailable. So progress was slow, until Matt Pfeil heard that I was leaving Rackspace and drove to San Antonio from Austin to talk me out of it. Not only was he not successful in talking me out of leaving, but he ended up co-founding Riptano. And here we are, with a Riptano mini-faq. Isn't Cassandra mostly just a web 2.0 thing for ex-mysql shops? Although most of the early adopters fit this stereotype, we&

Cassandra: Fact vs fiction

Cassandra has seen some impressive adoption success over the past months, leading some to conclude that Cassandra is the frontrunner in the highly scalable databases space (a subset of the hot NoSQL category ). Among all the attention, some misunderstandings have been propagated, which I'd like to clear up. Fiction : "Cassandra relies on high-speed fiber between datacenters" and can't reliably replicate between datacenters with more than a few ms of latency between them. Fact : Cassandra's multi-datacenter replication is one of its earliest features and is by far the most battle-tested in the NoSQL space. Facebook had Cassandra deployed on east and west coast datacenters since before open sourcing it. SimpleGeo's Cassandra cluster spans 3 EC2 availability zones , and Digg is also deployed on both coasts. Claims that this can't possibly work are an excellent sign that you're reading an article by someone who doesn't know what he's ta