Spyced

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...

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...