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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

By Patrick McKenzie (patio11) (original location: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/)

John Graham-Cumming wrote an article today complaining about how a computer system he was working with described his last name as having invalid characters. It of course does not, because anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them. John was understandably vexed about this situation, and he has every right to be, because names are central to our identities, virtually by definition.

I have lived in Japan for several years, programming in a professional capacity, and I have broken many systems by the simple expedient of being introduced into them. (Most people call me Patrick McKenzie, but I’ll acknowledge as correct any of six different “full” names, any many systems I deal with will accept precisely none of them.) Similarly, I’ve worked with Big Freaki

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Originally from http://soafacts.com

SOA is the only thing Chuck Norris can't kill.

SOA invented the internet, and the internet was invented for SOA.

SOA is not complex. You are just dumb.

In the last year, SOA increased Turkey's GDP by a factor of 10.

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(Scraped from the Internet Wayback Machine. Original content by Eran Hammer / hueniverse.com July 26, 2012)

OAuth 2.0 and the Road to Hell

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Well, that’s OAuth 2.0.

Last month I reached the painful conclusion that I can no longer be associated with the OAuth 2.0 standard. I resigned my role as lead author and editor, withdraw my name from the specification, and left the working group. Removing my name from a document I have painstakingly labored over for three years and over two dozen drafts was not easy. Deciding to move on from an effort I have led for over five years was agonizing.

There wasn’t a single problem or incident I can point to in order to explain such an extreme move. This is a case of death by a thousand cuts, and as the work was winding down, I’ve found myself reflecting more and more on what we actually accomplished. At the end, I reached the conclusion that OAuth 2.0 is a bad

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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