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I'm a programmer, and I'm on vacation today. Guess what I'm doing? As much as I'd love to tell you I'm sipping Mai Tais in the Bahamas, what I'm actually doing on my vacation is programming. So it's a "vacation" only in the HR sense – I'm taking official time off work, to give myself some free time to get my computer game back online. It's a game I started writing about ten years ago, and spent about seven years developing. It's been offline for a while and I need to bring it back up, in part so the players will stop stalking me. It's going to take me at least a week of all-day days, so I had to take a vacation from work to make it happen. Why did my game go offline? Not for want of popularity. It's a pretty successful game for a mostly part-time effort from one person. I've had over a quarter million individuals try it out (at least getting as far as creating a character), and tens of thousands of people who've ...

I had an exciting morning of not getting fired today. Get this: I'm on a trip to Google's Mountain View headquarters, and was glancing at Reddit between meetings, and lo and behold, I was inexplicably in the Reddit Tabloids again, this time for being fired, or so people were speculating (far too hopefully, I might add. Geez.) Needless to say, I immediately put all my other work-related plans on "pause" while I tried to figure out whether I was, in fact, being fired. Can't accuse me of not having my priorities straight! It turns out it was a minor mixup by an automated system, a system that decided to jump-start its own evolution by going directly from brownian motion to VP-level decision-making (2 evolutionary hops total. Hee.). This automated system had apparently just watched the movie Brazil , and thought it would be fun to send me off to Information Retrieval. So my account was disabled, from which lonely data point the Reddit crowd concluded that I ...

Objective: Obtain a position at IBM -- some idiot applying to Amazon.com WARNING: These are my own *personal* opinions, not Google's or Amazon's or anyone else's. I do think you'll find that most resume screeners at tech companies — particularly tech companies that build their own software in-house, like Yahoo! or eBay or Amazon.com or Microsoft or Google — will agree with a lot of this stuff, on the whole. But experienced screeners disagree on lots of the little details, and in the end these are just my own opinions. These tips are not guaranteed to get you any better results. Your mileage may vary. Do not use these tips in a bathtub or when standing in a pool of water. Do not tap on the glass or the tips will be irritated. Do not feed the tips. Etc. Today's scientific question is: why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful? And how do we fix them? The resumes, that is. If you've spent more than approximately seventeen kiloseconds as an i...

Welcome to the first-ever edition of Stevey's Tech News! And possibly last-ever as well! I've managed to get the scoop on a number of important tech-industry stories before they hit the presses, and I'm sticking it to The Man by getting this valuable information to you -- my loyal readers and casual passersby and violent detractors and so on -- before you can read it anywhere else. Enjoy! Sun Microsystems Demands University Study Retraction The University of Washington, apparently hoping to capitalize on the recent hype around their controversial study on Baby Einstein�-style videos, followed up yesterday with another, similar study. In the new study, researchers found that Java programmers understand an average of seven fewer Computer Science concepts per hour spent with Java each day compared to similar programmers using other languages. Sun calls the study "seriously flawed", citing the fact that you can combine the names of Gang of Four Design Patterns to...

I haven't blogged in a while. So much fun stuff going on! You have no idea. Fun! This blog entry is a bit overdue, though, and my muse hasn't visited me lately, so I'll just wing it tonight and hope for the best. OK. So branding. Yeah. Branding. A couple weeks ago, I gave a keynote talk at O'Reilly's OSCON . Nat Torkington, the world-famous co-author of the Perl Cookbook , was kind enough to invite me to be a keynote speaker. I don't know what he was smoking, but it must have been really good stuff. I'm still jealous. But wait, it gets even better. He had me scheduled at some godawful hour, like 9:45am or something. So I naturally assumed -- this being a programmer's conference and all -- that I was essentially one of those crap garage bands that just barely make the cut for Bumbershoot and get slotted on Friday morning before anyone actually shows up. Fine. So I'm filler. I can live with that. In any case I haven't been to Port...

What a day. Apparently getting John Lam 'd is worse than getting Slashdotted. My team has been laughing at me all day; we have no idea how I get into messes like this. Rather than reply individually to the crush of email, I guess I'll just do a bulk update. But first: is anyone else as nonplussed as I am that of all the amazing things that were discussed in Foo Camp, my little improvised talk -- complete with a picture of me that for some reason looks as if I'd just crawled out of a tent 20 minutes prior, hung over and disoriented and wondering why I was in a field in the middle of Sebastopol, CA, only to find that the night before I'd apparently I'd signed up to give a 10am talk -- winds up being splashed all over everyone's blog, not to mention my inbox? I mean, Foo Camp was truly amazing. There were just insanely brilliant people there, all presenting slick, well-prepared talks and roundtable discussions on vitally important topics such as improving democr...