Phillip Rhodes mindcrime

Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

I've spent the past eight years (starting back in June 2004) writing elaborate rants about a bunch of vaguely related software engineering issues.

I was doing all that ranting because I've been genuinely perplexed by a set of "bizarre" world-views held dear by -- as far as I can tell -- about half of all programmers I encounter, whether online or in person.

Last week, after nearly a decade of hurling myself against this problem, I've finally figured it out. I know exactly what's been bothering me.

In today's essay I'm going to present you with a new conceptual framework for thinking about software engineering. This set of ideas I present will be completely obvious to you. You will probably slap yourself for not having thought of it yourself. Or you might slap the person next to you. In fact you probably have thought of it yourself, because it is so blindingly obvious.

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost daily -- is that Amazon does everything wrong, and Google does everything right. Sure, it's a sweeping generalization, but a surprisingly accurate one. It's pretty crazy. There are probably a hundred or even two hundred different ways you can compare the two companies, and Google is superior in all but three of them, if I recall correctly. I actually did a spreadsheet at one point but Legal wouldn't let me show it to anyone, even though recruiting loved it.

I mean, just to give you a very brief taste: Amazon's recruiting process is fundamentally flawed by having teams hire for themselves, so their hiring bar is incredibly inconsistent across teams, despite various efforts they've made to level it out. And their operations are a mess; they don't real

	#!/usr/bin/env python2

	import usbtmc
	import time
	from math import sin

	listOfDevices = usbtmc.getDeviceList()
	dn = listOfDevices[0]
	d = usbtmc.UsbTmcDriver(dn)
	print d.getName()