O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.

Velocity Profile: Justin Huff

2012-05-16T15:00:00Z

This is part of the Velocity Profiles series, which highlights the work and knowledge of web ops and performance experts.

Justin Huff
Software Engineer
PicMonkey
@jjhuff

How did you get into web operations and performance?

Picnik's founders Mike Harrington and Darrin Massena needed someone who knew something about Linux. Darrin and I had known each other for a few years, so my name came up. At the time, I was doing embedded systems work, but ended up moonlighting for Picnik. It wasn't long before I came over full time. I always expected to help them get off the ground and then they'd find a "real sysadmin" to take over. Turns out, I ended up enjoying ops! I was lucky enough to straddle the world between ops and back-end dev. Sound familiar?

What is your most memorable project?

Completing a tight database upgrade at a Starbucks mid-way between Seattle and Portland. "Replicate faster, PLEASE!" Also, in the build-up to Picnik's acquisition by Google, Mike asked me what it would take to handle 10 times our current traffic and to do it in 30 days. We doubled Picnik's hardware, including a complete network overhaul. It went flawlessly and continued to serve Picnik until Google shut it down in April of this year.

What's the toughest problem you've had to solve?

When Flickr launched with Picnik as its photo editor, we started to see really weird behavior causing some Flickr API calls to hang. I spent a good chunk of that day on the phone with John Allspaw and finally identified an issue with how our NAT box was munging TCP timestamps that were interacting badly with Flickr's servers. I learned a couple things: First, both John and I were able to gather highly detailed info (tcpdumps) at key points in our networks (and hosts) — sometimes you just have to go deep; second, it's absolutely imperative that you have good technical contacts with your partners.

What tools and techniques do you rely on most?

Graphs and monitoring are critical. Vim, because I can't figure out Emacs. Automation, because I can't even remember what I had for breakfast.

Who do you follow in the web operations and performance world?

Bryan Berry (@bryanwb) is great. Joe Williams (@williamsjoe) is doing great stuff — and his Twitter profile pic is awesome.

What is your web operations and performance super power?

I think I'm good at building, maintaining, and understanding complete systems. Other engineering disciplines are typically concerned about the details of a single part of a larger system. As web engineers, we have to grok the system, the components, and their interactions ... at 2 AM.

Velocity 2012: Web Operations & Performance — The smartest minds in web operations and performance are coming together for the Velocity Conference, being held June 25-27 in Santa Clara, Calif.

Save 20% on registration with the code RADAR20

Related:

See more Velocity Profiles

A federal judge learned to code

2012-05-16T14:30:00Z

The last couple of days, there's been a fair amount of blogosphere angst over Coding Horror's "Please Don't Learn to Code." Ironically, the best argument for learning to code appeared this morning, when it turned out that Judge William Alsup in the Google case could program, and learned Java in the course of the trial, and wasn't going for Oracle's claim that a short range-checking function was days of work. Alsup recognized immediately (and says he wrote the function hundreds of times during the course of the trial) that it's just a few minutes work for a competent programmer.

The importance of learning to code isn't so that everyone will write code, and bury the world under billions of lines of badly conceived Python, Java, and Ruby. The importance of code is that it's a part of the world we live in. I've had enough of legislators who think the Internet is about tubes, who haven't the slightest idea about legitimate uses for file transfer utilities, and no concept at all about what privacy (and the invasion of privacy) might mean in an online space. I've had enough of patent inspectors who approve patents for which prior art has existed for decades. And I've had enough of judges making rulings after listening to lawyers arguing about technologies they don't understand. Learning to code won't solve these problems, but coding does force engagement with technology on a level other than pure ignorance.

Coding is a part of cultural competence, even if you never do it professionally. Alsup is a modern hero.

How to start a successful business in health care at Health 2.0 conference

2012-05-16T14:10:14Z

Great piles of cash are descending on entrepreneurs who develop health care apps, but that doesn't make it any easier to create a useful one that your audience will adopt. Furthermore, lowered costs and streamlined application development technique let you fashion a working prototype faster than ever, but that also reduces the time you can fumble around looking for a business model. These were some of the insights I got at Spring Fling 2012: Matchpoint Boston, put on by Health 2.0 this week.

This conference was a bit of a grab-bag, including one-on-one meetings between entrepreneurs and their potential funders and customers, keynotes and panels by health care experts, round-table discussions among peers, and lightning-talk demos. I think the hallway track was the most potent part of this conference, and it was probably planned that way. The variety at the conference mirrors the work of Health 2.0 itself, which includes local chapters, challenges, an influential blog, and partnerships with a range of organizations. Overall, I appreciated the chance to get a snapshot of a critical industry searching for ways to make a positive difference in the world while capitalizing on ways to cut down on the blatant waste and mismanagement that bedevil the multi-trillion-dollar health care field.

Let's look, for instance, at the benefits of faster development time. Health IT companies go through fairly standard early stages (idea, prototype, incubator, venture capital funding) but cochairs Indu Subaiya and Matthew Holt showed slides demonstrating that modern techniques can leave companies in the red for less time and accelerate earnings. On the other hand, Jonathan Bush of athenahealth gave a keynote listing bits of advice for company founders and admitting that his own company had made significant errors that required time to recover from. Does the fast pace of modern development leave less room for company heads to make the inevitable mistakes?

I also heard Margaret Laws, director of the California HealthCare Foundation's Innovations Fund, warn that most of the current applications being developed for health care aim to salve common concerns among doctors or patients but don't address what she calls the "crisis points" in health care. Brad Fluegel of Health Evolution Partners observed that, with the flood of new entrepreneurs in health IT, a lot of old ideas are being recycled without adequate attention to why they failed before.

I'm afraid this blog is coming out too negative, focusing on the dour and the dire, but I do believe that health IT needs to acknowledge its risks in order to avoid squandering the money and attention it's getting, and on the positive side to reap the benefits of this incredibly fertile moment of possibilities in health care. Truly, there's a lot to celebrate in health IT as well. Here are some of the fascinating start-ups I saw at the show:

hellohealth aims at that vast area of health care planning and administration that cries out for efficiency improvements--the area where we could do the most good by cutting costs without cutting back on effective patient care. Presenter Shahid Shah described the company as the intersection of patient management with revenue cycle management. They plan to help physicians manage appointments and follow-ups better, and rationalize the whole patient experience.

hellohealth will offer portals for patients as well. They're unique, so far as I know, in charging patients for certain features.
Corey Booker demo'd onPulse, which aims to bring together doctors with groups of patients, and patients with groups of the doctors treating them. For instance, when a doctor finds an online article of interest to diabetics, she can share it with all the patients in her practice suffering from diabetes. onPulse also makes it easier for a doctor to draw in others who are treating the same patient. The information built up about their interactions can be preserved for billing.

onPulse overlaps in several respects with HealthTap, a doctor-patient site that I've covered several times and for which an onPulse staffer expressed admiration. But HealthTap leaves discussions out in the open, whereas onPulse connects doctors and patients in private.
HealthPasskey.com is another one of these patient/doctor services with a patient portal. It allows doctors to upload continuity of care documents in the standard CCD format to the patient's site, and supports various services such as making appointments.

A couple weeks ago I reported a controversy over hospitals' claims that they couldn't share patient records with the patients. Check out the innovative services I've just highlighted here as a context for judging whether the technical and legal challenges for hospitals are really too daunting. I recognize that each of the sites I've described pick off particular pieces of the EHR problem and that opening up the whole kit and kaboodle is a larger task, but these sites still prove that all the capabilities are in place for institutions willing to exploit them.
GlobalMed has recently released a suitcase-sized box that contains all the tools required to do a standard medical exam. This allows traveling nurse practitioners or other licensed personnel to do a quick check-up at a patient's location without requiring a doctor or a trip to the clinic. Images can also be taken. Everything gets uploaded to a site where a doctor can do an assessment and mark up records later. The suitcase weighs about 30 pounds, rolls on wheels, and costs about $30,000 (price to come down if they start manufacturing in high quantities).
SwipeSense won Health 2.0's 100 Day Innovation Challenge. They make a simple device that hospital staff can wear on their belts and wipe their hands on. This may not be as good as washing your hands, but takes advantage of people's natural behavior and reduces the chance of infections. It also picks up when someone is using the device and creates reports about compliance. SwipeSense is being tested at the Rush University Medical Center.
Thryve, one of several apps that helps you track your food intake and make better choices, won the highest audience approval at Thursday's Launch! demos.
Winner of last weekend's developer challenge was No Sleep Kills, an app that aims to reduce accidents related to sleep deprivation (I need a corresponding app to guard against errors from sleep-deprived blogging). You can enter information on your recent sleep patterns and get back a warning not to drive.

It's worth noting that the last item in that list, No Sleep Kills, draws information from Health and Human Services's Healthy People site. This raises the final issue I want to bring up in regard to the Spring Fling. Sophisticated developers know their work depends heavily on data about public health and on groups of patients. HHS has actually just released another major trove of public health statistics. Our collective knowledge of who needs help, what works, and who best delivers the care would be immensely enhanced if doctors and institutions who currently guard their data would be willing to open it up in aggregate, non-identifiable form. I recently promoted this ideal in coverage of Sage Congress.

In the entirely laudable drive to monetize improvements in health care, I would like the health IT field to choose solutions that open up data rather than keep it proprietary. One of the biggest problems with health care, in this age of big data and incredibly sophisticated statistical tools, is our tragedy of the anti-commons where each institution seeks to gain competitive advantage through hoarding its data. They don't necessarily use their own data in socially beneficial ways, either (they're more interested in ratcheting up opportunities for marketing expensive care). We need collective sources of data in order to make the most of innovation.

The chicken and egg of big data solutions

2012-05-16T14:00:00Z

Before I came to O'Reilly I was building the "big data and disruptive analytics practice" at a major systems integrator. It was a blast to spend every week talking to customers in different industries who were waking up to the possibilities that technologies like Hadoop offered their businesses. Many of these businesses are going to fundamentally change as they embrace this stuff (or be replaced by those that do). But there's a catch.

Twenty years or so ago large integrators made big business building applications on the then-new relational paradigm. They put in Oracle databases with custom code, wrote PowerBuilder apps on Sybase, and of course lots of businesses rolled their own with VB and SQL Server. It was an era of custom coding where Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, Informix and etc. were thought of as platforms to build stuff on.

Then the market matured and shifted to package solution implementation. ERP, CRM, …, etc. The big guys focused on integrating again and told their clients there was no ROI in building custom stuff. ROI would come from integrating best-of-breed solutions. Databases became commodity back ends to the applications that were always the real focus.

Now along comes big data, NoSQL, data science, and all that stuff and it seems like we're starting the cycle over again. But this time clients, having been well trained over the last decade or so, aren't having any of that "build it from scratch" mentality. They know that Hadoop and other new technologies can be transformative to their business, but they want it packaged up and solution'ified like they are used to. I heard a lot of "let us know when you have a solution already built or available to buy that does X" in the last year.

Also, lots of the shops that do this stuff at scale are built and staffed around the package implementation model and have shed many of the skills they used to have for custom work. Everything from staffing models to methodologies are oriented toward package installation.

So, here we are with all of this disruptive technology, but we seem to have lost the institutional wherewithal to do anything with it in a lot of large companies. Of course that fact was hard on my numbers. I had a great pipeline of companies with pain to solve, and great technologies to solve it, but too much of the time it was hard to close it without readymade solutions.

Every week I talked to the companies building these new platforms to share leads and talk about their direction. After a while I started cutting them off when they wanted to talk about the features of their next release. I just got to the point where I didn't really care, it just wasn't all that relevant to my customers. I mean, it's important that they are making the platforms more manageable and building bridges to traditional BI, ETL, RDBMS, and the like. But the focus was too much on platforms and tools.

I wanted to know "What are you doing to encourage solution development? Are you staffing a support system for ISVs? What startups and/or established players are you aware of that are building solutions on this platform?" So when I saw this tweet I let out a little yelp. Awesome! The lack of ready-to-install solutions was getting attention, and from Mike Olsen.

Cloudera CEO wants startups to build Hadoop apps. He will connect you to funding. #dataconf
— MJHarkins (@uberjake42) March 21, 2012

You can watch the rest of what Mike Olson said here and you'll find he tells a similar story about the RDBMS historical parallel.

I talked to Mike a few weeks ago to find out what was behind his comment and explore what else they are doing to support solution development. It boils down to what he said — he will help connect you with money — plus a newly launched partner program designed to provide better support to ISVs among others. Also, the continued attention to APIs and tools like Pig and Hive should make it easier for the solution ecosystem to develop. It can only be good for his business to have lots of other companies directly solving business problems, and simply pulling in his platform.

Hortonworks also started a partner program in the fall and I think we'll see a lot more emphasis on this across the space this year. However, at the moment wherever I look (Hortonworks partners, Cloudera Partners, Accel big data portfolio) the focus today remains firmly on platform and tools or partnering with integrators. Tresata, a startup focused on financial risk management, pops up in in a lot of lists as the obvious odd one out — an actual domain-specific solution.

What about other people that could be building solutions? Is it the maturity level of the technology, the lack of penetration of Hadoop etc. into your customer's data centers, or some combination of other factors that is slowing things down?

Of course, during the RDBMS adoption it took a lot of years before the custom era was over and thoroughly replaced by the era of package implementation. The question I'm pondering is whether customer expectations and the pace of technology will make it happen faster this time? Or is the disruptive value of big data going to continue to accrue only to risk-taking early adopters for the foreseeable future?

If you are building a startup based on a solution or application that leverages big data technology, and you aren't being stealthy, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

Related:

Four short links: 16 May 2012

2012-05-16T10:00:00Z

Many Old Periodicals -- I'm working my way through the back issues of "Thrilling Love". Sample story, Moonmist for Mary by Dorothy Daniels, from Feb 1950. Filing clerk Mary wins the heart of her secret coworker romance AND closes the sale AND is promised stock. It's torn from the pages of real life, I tell ya!
Please Don't Learn to Code (Jeff Atwood) -- my take: everyone who is a "knowledge worker" should learn to program (who of us has not seen people wasting time with something we could automate in 10 lines of code?). It's hard to justify an adult like Bloomberg to take the time to learn to code, because he's already powerful and can hire other people to code. For this reason, I think kids should routinely be taught computational thinking (decomposition, pattern matching, etc.) and programming as a useful application of these skills. (via Jim Stogdill)
Fungible News -- Here’s my hypothesis. Educated people over forty have come to assume that journalism, whether on television, radio, print or the web, is the most convenient way to get answers to questions like what’s on the television, what’s going on in my neighborhood, who got elected, who is making a mess of things, any new music I should hear? [...] The younger the person you ask, the less likely it is you’ll find that link between wanting to know what’s going on and grabbing a paper or opening up a news website. They use Pinterest to figure out what’s fashionable and Facebook to see if there’s anything fun going on next weekend. They use Facebook just the same to figure out whether there’s anything they need to be upset about and need to protest against. (via Phil Lindsay)
FF-Chartwell, a Graph-Making Font -- brilliant! Font uses ligatures to show graphs. This is an elegant hack in so many ways, for example: copy and paste and you get the bare numbers! (via Chris Spurgeon)

Profile of the Data Journalist: The Data News Editor

2012-05-15T19:00:00Z

Around the globe, the bond between data and journalism is growing stronger. In an age of big data, the growing importance of data journalism lies in the ability of its practitioners to provide context, clarity and, perhaps most important, find truth in the expanding amount of digital content in the world. In that context, data journalism has profound importance for society. (You can learn more about this world and the emerging leaders of this discipline in the newly released "Data Journalism Handbook.")

To learn more about the people who are doing this work and, in some cases, building the newsroom stack for the 21st century, I conducted in-person and email interviews during the 2012 NICAR Conference and published a series of data journalist profiles here at Radar.

John Keefe (@jkeefe) is a senior editor for data news and journalism technology at WNYC public radio, based in New York City, NY. He attracted widespread attention when an online map he built using available data beat the Associated Press with Iowa caucus results earlier this year. He's posted numerous tutorials and resources for budding data journalists, including how to map data onto county districts, use APIs, create news apps without a backend content management system and make election results maps. As you'll read below, Keefe is a great example of a journalist who picked up these skills from the data journalism community and the Hacks/Hackers group.

Our interview follows, lightly edited for content and clarity. (I've also added a Twitter list of data journalist from the New York Times' Jacob Harris.)

Where do you work now? What is a day in your life like?

I work in the middle of the WNYC newsroom -- quite literally. So throughout the day, I have dozens of impromptu conversations with reporters and editors about their ideas for maps and data projects, or answering questions about how to find or download data.

Our team works almost entirely on "news time," which means our creations hit the Web in hours and days more often than weeks and months. So I'm often at my laptop creating or tweaking maps and charts to go with online stories. That said, Wednesday mornings it's breakfast at a Chelsea cafe with collaborators at Balance Media to update each other on longer-range projects and tools we make for the newsroom and then open source, like Tabletop.js and our new vertical timeline.

Then there are key meetings, such as the newsroom's daily and weekly editorial discussions, where I look for ways to contribute and help. And because there's a lot of interest and support for data news at the station, I'm also invited to larger strategy and planning meetings.

How did you get started in data journalism? Did you get any special degrees or certificates?

I've been fascinated with the intersection of information, design and technology since I was a kid. In the last couple of years, I've marveled at what journalists at the New York Times, ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune were doing online. I thought the public radio audience, which includes a lot of educated, curious people, would appreciate such data projects at WNYC, where I was news director.

Then I saw that Aron Pilhofer of the New York Times would be teaching a programming workshop at the 2009 Online News Association annual meeting. I signed up. In preparation, I installed Django on my laptop and started following the beginner's tutorial on my subway commute. I made my first "Hello World!" web app on the A Train.

I also started hanging out at Hacks/Hackers meetups and hackathons, where I'd watch people code and ask questions along the way.

Some of my experimentation made it onto the WNYC's website -- including our 2010 Census maps and the NYC Hurricane Evacuation map ahead of Hurricane Irene. Shortly thereafter, WNYC management asked me to focus on it full-time.

Did you have any mentors? Who? What were the most important resources they shared with you?

I could not have done so much so fast without kindness, encouragement and inspiration from Pilhofer at the Times; Scott Klein, Al Shaw, Jennifer LaFleur and Jeff Larson at ProPublica; , Chris Groskopf, Joe Germuska and Brian Boyer at the Chicago Tribune; and Jenny 8. Lee of, well, everywhere.

Each has unstuck me at various key moments and all have demonstrated in their own work what amazing things were possible. And they have put a premium on sharing what they know -- something I try to carry forward.

The moment I may remember most was at an afternoon geek talk aimed mainly at programmers programmers. After seeing a demo of a phone app called Twilio, I turned to Al Shaw, sitting next to me, and lamented that I had no idea how to play with such things.

"You absolutely can do this," he said.

He encouraged me to pick up Sinatra, a surprisingly easy way to use the Ruby programming language. And I was off.

What does your personal data journalism "stack" look like? What tools could you not live without?

Google Maps - Much of what I can turn around quickly is possible because of Google Maps. I'm also experimenting with MapBox and Geocommons for more data-intensive mapping projects, like our NYC diversity map.

Google Fusion Tables - Essential for my wrangling, merging and mapping of data sets on the fly.

Google Spreadsheets - These have become the "backend" to many of our data projects, giving reporters and editors direct access to the data driving an application, chart or map. We wire them to our apps using Tabletop.js, an open-source program we helped to develop.

TextMate - A programmer's text editor for Mac. There are several out there, and some are free. TextMate is my fave.

The JavaScript Tools Bundle for Textmate - It checks my JavaScript code ever time I save, flagging me to near-invisible, infuriating errors such as a stray comma or a missing parenthesis. I'm certain this one piece of software has given me more days with my kids.

Firebug for Firefox - Lets you see what your code is doing in the browser. Essential for troubleshooting CSS and JavaScript, and great for learning how the heck other people make cool stuff.

Amazon S3 - Most of what we build are static pages of html and JavaScript, which we host in the Amazon cloud and embed into article pages on our CMS.

census.ire.org - A fabulous, easy-to-navigate presentation of US Census data made by a bunch of journo-programmers for Investigative Reporters and Editors. I send someone there probably once a week.

What data journalism project are you the most proud of working on or creating?

I'd have to say our GOP Iowa Caucuses feature. It has several qualities I like:

Mashed-up data -- It mixes live, county vote results with Patchwork Nation community types.

A new take -- We know other news sites would shade Iowa's counties by the winner; we shaded them by community type and showed who won which categories.

Complete sharability -- We made it super-easy for anyone to embed the map into their own site, which was possible because the results came license-free from the state GOP via Google.

Key code from another journalist -- The map-rollover coolness comes from code built by Albert Sun, then of the Wall Street Journal and now at the New York Times.

Rapid learning -- I taught myself a LOT of JavaScript quickly.

Reusability -- We used it for which we did for each state until Santorum bowed out.

Bonus: I love that I made most of it sitting at my mom's kitchen table over winter break.

Where do you turn to keep your skills updated or learn new things?

WNYC's editors and reporters. They have the bug, and they keep coming up with new and interesting projects. And I find project-driven learning is the most effective way to discover new things. New York Public Radio -- which runs WNYC along with classical radio station WQXR, New Jersey Public Radio and a street-level performance space -- also has a growing stable of programmers and designers, who help me build things, teach me amazing tricks and spot my frequent mistakes.

The IRE/NICAR annual conference. It's a meetup of the best journo-programmers in the country, and it truly seems each person is committed to helping others learn. They're also excellent at celebrating the successes of others.

Twitter. I follow a bunch of folks who seem to tweet the best stuff, and try to keep a close eye on 'em.

Why are data journalism and "news apps" important, in the context of the contemporary digital environment for information?

Candidates, companies, municipalities, agencies and non-profit organizations all are using data. And a lot of that data is about you, me and the people we cover.

So first off, journalism needs an understanding of the data available and what it can do. It's just part of covering the story now. To skip that part of the world would shortchange our audience, and our democracy. Really.

And the better we can both present data to the general public and tell data-driven (or -supported) stories with impact, the better we can do great journalism.

DIY learning: Schoolers, Edupunks, and Makers challenge education as we know it

2012-05-15T13:00:00Z

Create, disassemble, repurpose! DIY-ers relentlessly void warranties and crack manufacturers' cases, showing us what is possible when people decide that they, not the vendors, truly own the technology they have purchased. "If you can't open it, you don't own it," the Make Owner's Manifesto tells us.

This DIY ethic is now seeping into one of the most locked-down social institutions in existence: education. Educators, parents, technologists, students, and others have begun looking at the components, subassemblies, assemblies and specifications of excellent education and are finding ways to improve, reimagine, and reinvent learning at every level. They are inspired by a multiplicity of sources, from neuroscience to gaming, to knock down the barriers to learning that exist for so many young people. In every way, they are looking at the components of teaching and learning, and finding ways to re-create them to be more efficient; more effective; and, critically, more modular.

The disassembly of traditional educational products and processes into modular pieces invites students and educators to mash up apps and lessons and processes in ways that are more appealing, enjoyable, or effective for a particular learner or group. This puts us on the path to personalized learning. It weakens the requirement for students to learn together in lockstep, covering the same material at the same pace at the same time by listening to lectures in the same room and turning in the same homework on the same morning. It invites tinkering with different ways to break apart building blocks and put them back together while creating room for new building blocks to fit into those emerging structures.

What do these building blocks look like? They include content that gives everyone with an Internet connection access to free lessons on just about any topic from the Khan academy to MIT Open courseware and lots more. There are videos and simulations such as those created by University of Colorado's PHET that show processes and concepts that are difficult to visualize. We see platforms like Edmodo that let students and educators communicate with each other any place any time via the Internet. There are augmented reality applications and immersive interfaces for learning. There are a host of apps and software that let students learn new concepts and drill important skills in ways that are more engaging than worksheets and textbooks.

The tools and technologies that are cherry-picked online or handcrafted by educators and learners enable more choices, more freedom, more personalization and more ownership than ever was possible with one teacher, 30 kids, and old-school print resources. We are beginning to see what is possible when learners, not institutions, own the education that is going to define their lives.

Improving schooling

Schoolers recombine the components of education to make schools better. They seek to increase opportunities for all students to be well prepared for college and careers that will allow them to participate economically on a level playing field in a global market.

Schoolers are applying new tools to traditional goals to crack open the case on the traditional schoolhouse. With laptops, tablets, and cell phones, students no longer wait to be spoon-fed information, but reach out beyond the walls of the classroom for images, information, and insights at the moment the question arises for them. Social learning sprawls beyond two-hour "group work" to anytime, anyplace collaborations using tools like Google Docs, Edmodo, text messaging, and even Facebook. Via Skype and video streaming, experts can visit classrooms and engage in meaningful talks with students both as individuals and in groups. Schools are using "blended learning" (combining online learning with brick-and-mortar schools) to let students work at their own pace and study topics that interest them beyond the classes they can afford to offer. Students across the globe connect with each other, learn how other cultures see them, and are bemused by the misperceptions.

We see flipped classrooms where students listen to lectures via podcast at home, leaving more face-to-face class time for deeper exploration, critical thinking work, and discussion. We see at-risk students moving from low achievement and aspirations in math to completing AP courses and heading for college once they start using mobile devices for peer mentoring and developing learning communities. We see young people eager to spend more time on math, thanks to engaging apps and competitive leader boards. Most importantly, we see students gaining a sense of agency in their own learning — education is less something that is done to them, and more something they own.

Re-specifying education

Edupunks take educational building blocks and repurpose them in ways ranging from the mundane to the nearly unrecognizable. Not content with improving schooling, the movement is deeply infused with a DIY ethic that questions the purpose of education and the legitimacy of institutional definitions. In effect, they place the right and responsibility of defining educational goals and approaches on learners and their communities, and put the disassembled building blocks of educational technology to personal use.

We see Edupunk teens and young adults creating their own majors; creating new jobs and careers; learning through travel, work, apprenticeship; and getting traditional college schooling online without incurring massive college debt. The Edupunk's Guide to a DIY Credential asks young people to create their own learning plan, keeping in mind that "'I want a college degree' is not a goal, because it's not an end in itself."

We see Edupunk alternatives to traditional, costly college credentialing, including online universities, Udacity and University of the People. We see Edupunk parents creating alternatives to coercive education, such as Unschooling, where children learn through play, participation in work and household responsibilities, and other life experiences, hoping that their children will learn not only the basic skills needed to be effective in their lives and communities, but also retain their joy, creativity, and initiative.

We see Edupunk technologists and innovators finding ways to replace institutionally defined, expensive learning tools and materials with modular, free and open alternatives, such as Open Education Resources, Moodle, CK12, and many more. We also see free tech, such as the curation software from Pathbrite, that lets us show off our accomplishments much more richly with portfolios than with grades.

Making to learn and learning to make

Makers participate in a DIY community that embraces "technology on their own time." At Maker Faire, we can see projects that call for the knowledge, talent, and skill of a 21st-century Renaissance person. We also become immersed in an eclectic community of modern innovators who take joy in the hard work of creation and in sharing not only completed projects and achievements, but their knowledge, ideas, and tricks of the trade.

When we talk about making and learning, we usually do so from two perspectives: "making to learn" and "learning to make." "Making to learn" refers to the phenomenon that real learning is an inevitable side effect of making. In this context, the learning serves the maker's own true purposes (as opposed to simply winning good grades). That means that the learning is deep and meaningful, and stays with the maker.

Much of this learning turns out to be the kind that is valued in schooling, such as electronics, programming, and other skills and knowledge that are valuable to the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Even more of this learning turns out to be the kind that is valuable in life, such as the perseverance to achieve ambitious goals, even in the face of obstacles; the technical fluency to use modern resources such as Instructables, YouTube, blogs, and other online sources; and the collaboration skills required for participating in communities that are local and face-to-face as well as those that are global and virtual.

"Learning to make" refers to the intentionality with which makers pursue the skills and knowledge they need for their projects. Makers learn their trades through traditional and non-traditional means. They may take a welding class at a local maker space, take a programming class at a community college, get advice from other makers at a local Dorkbot meetup, or figure things out through trial and error. Makers become expert learners.

Importantly, at a time when we are struggling nationally with a fundamentally flawed system to test and grade children to make sure they are learning, the maker community shows us another viable and proven approach. As with authentic communities of practice or learning communities, makers respect contribution and work at all levels of proficiency and innovation. The standard of excellence is set by an emergent, distributed consensus where makers individually and collectively recognize great work when they see it and use the example of others to raise the bar for their own work. Ron Berger explains how setting the bar for quality work in a classroom works very similarly in his book, "An Ethic of Excellence."

Sharing the experience at Maker Faire

This year's Maker Faire is coming up this weekend and is an unparalleled opportunity to experience the DIY ethic as it applies to young people first hand. Families with kids ranging from toddlers to teens will make rockets, learn how to solder, sew, and make all kinds of interesting projects. Young Makers will show off the ambitious projects they have developed over the past year. EdSurge and the Charter School Growth Fund will host a DIY Learning Pavilion where some of the building blocks of DIY learning will be exhibited as well as examples of how they are repurposed by schoolers, Edupunks, and makers alike. This year, visitors will be participating in DIY learning as they engage with makers and participate in making their own projects all over the Faire as well as building a collective learning portfolio with Pathbrite.

In a pretty fundamental way, DIY is intrinsically about owning your learning as well as your hardware. No wonder there is a growing movement to open it up, void the warranty, and tinker. What will you make of it?

Related:

John Allspaw on DevOps

2012-05-15T12:48:33Z

In this new Velocity Podcast, I had a conversation with John Allspaw (@allspaw), a VP of Operations at Etsy.com. This conversation centers mostly on development and operations cooperating in high-volume companies. John has some interesting insights into how good DevOps keeps you shipping your product.

Our conversation lasted 00:23:31. If you want to pinpoint any particular topic, you can find the specific timing below. There is a bit of a hiccup at around 21:21 so you will know that now it is not your connection, but our prior connection.

Can you explain the difference between DevOps and NoOps 00:00:43

If you have really good DevOps and your systems are running efficiently all the time, can you measure it? 00:05:44

What criteria do you use to measure the effectiveness of DevOps in an organization? 00:10:43

What does a typical dashboard look like that you use to monitor your systems and DevOps capabilities? 00:16:05

Where do you see the velocity conference going? 00:20:35

If you would like to hear John speak on "Stronger and Faster," he is presenting at the 2012 Velocity Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday 6/26/12 at 8:30 am. He'll also present "Cuz|Eats Me Spinish" on Wednesday 6/27/12 at 8:30 am. We hope to see you there.

Related:

Subscribe to the free Velocity podcast through iTunes

See more Velocity podcasts

Four short links: 15 May 2012

2012-05-15T10:00:00Z

Mobile Money (The Economist) -- Many people know that "mobile money"—financial transactions on mobile phones—has taken off in Africa. How far it has gone, though, still comes as a bit of a shock. Three-quarters of the countries that use mobile money most frequently are in Africa, and mobile banking in some of them has reached extraordinary levels.
Akka -- Apache-licensed Java high-performance concurrency library built around the concept of "actors". (via Hacker News)
Pykka -- actors in Python. (via Hacker News)
Loom.io Project -- help crowdfund a collaborative decision-making tool. They're using it as they build the tool, and it's the implementation of a process they use in real life. I know many organisations who need a free open-source web application that helps groups make better decisions together. You should probably read more about the interesting company Enspiral which is behind loom.io.

Why I can't shake my ereader

2012-05-14T13:00:00Z

This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog ("B&N's Nook with GlowLight: Why I Still Use an eInk eReader"). This version has been lightly edited.

My new E Ink reader, B&N's Nook with GlowLight, arrived last Thursday. I'm winding down my use of a Kindle Touch and wanted to move to another ebook retailer's platform going forward. This, of course, is a major headache since I've already bought dozens of DRM-protected ebooks from Amazon. I figure I'll read the last couple I bought on my Kindle and all future purchases will be from B&N ... until some other device catches my eye.

So, what do I think of the Nook with GlowLight? It's just like my Kindle Touch, but with a built-in light. That pretty much sums it up. E Ink ereaders have quickly become a commodity. Sure, B&N was the first to build a light source into its device but I'm sure Amazon and others will be close behind. When you're buying one of these devices, it's less about the device and more about which retailer you want to commit to. That's an unfortunate by-product of DRM.

I'm happy with the Nook so far, but it's not wowing me. Then again, I didn't really expect it to. The benefit I see for the GlowLight isn't for reading in bed but for reading on a plane. About half the time I press that overhead light button on a plane nothing happens. The bulb is either burned out or the fixture is broken. I guess that's another sign of the times as airlines continue cutting back on their services. Let's just hope they spend more time making sure the engines are in better working order than the overhead lights.

Two years ago, I didn't think I'd be using an E Ink reader at all. I had just bought a first-gen iPad and was putting my Kindle in storage. That worked for about a year. I then saw a third-gen Kindle and decided it was thin and lightweight enough to carry with my iPad. In fact, the iPad case I was using had a handy pocket that the Kindle fit into perfectly.

I ditched my iPad a few months ago for an Android tablet and now I'll be taking that plus my Nook with me on the road. Even though I could easily read all my books on that Android tablet, I still prefer to do all my long-form reading on an E Ink device. Why?

It's not really about the display and how great it is in the sun, as I rarely find myself reading outdoors. My eyes never had any problem reading for an hour or two at a time on the iPad display, either. For some reason, I never ran into the eye fatigue I get with my laptop's display. The reason I'm hooked on E Ink displays has to do with battery life and device weight. If I'm reading for more than 20 minutes or so, I'd much rather hold a feather-light E Ink reader than any tablet out there. I also love that I can go weeks without recharging an E Ink device. It seems like my iPad and now my Android tablet's battery rapidly loses juice when using a reader app on it ... much more so than when I'm just watching a video on the device. I end up having to recharge that Android tablet at least every couple of days. That doesn't sound like a big deal, but it makes me much more miserly when I'm on a plane for several hours with no power source available.

There's talk of hybrid display devices coming out soon. Think of a tablet with the ability to switch to an E Ink-like display that's (supposedly) easier on the eyes and offers a much longer window between charges. It sounds like it will still need a pretty large battery so it lasts long enough between charges in tablet mode. Unless battery technology changes radically between now and then, I doubt I'd buy one since it will still probably be a fairly heavy device.

Thankfully, these E Ink readers are pretty inexpensive and incredibly lightweight. I might be in the minority, but I see myself carrying both an E Ink reader and a tablet for the foreseeable future. And for now, at least, that E Ink reader is B&N's Nook.

Related:

Four short links: 14 May 2012

2012-05-14T10:00:00Z

Shiri = Japanese Robotic Ass (YouTube) -- I couldn't watch after 2m30s or so when he starts slapping the robot ass. I never imagined a butt as UI. I eagerly await the hobbyist version, the Arduino Ass Shield. (via Ed Yong)
Facebook Tests 'Pay to Promote' Tool (BBC) -- pay to raise prominence of your message, feature being tested in New Zealand. It's when they offer splash-screen unclosable must-sit-through autoplay video ads as a product that the shark will have been jumped, caught, stripped off fins, and dumped in the ocean with a "EAT AT MORTIE'S" neon sign on its rotting corpse.
The Newsonomics of Pricing 101 (Nieman Lab) -- observes that we are starting to get data on what people will pay for, and how much. Subscribers of the Economist didn't generally know how much they were paying, and over-estimated the price—suggesting they'd pay more. That suggests pricing power. It makes sense that publishers, new to the pricing trade, have approached it gingerly. Yet the circulation revenue upside may well be substantial. (via Julie Starr)
Head of Google News on the Future of News -- In 2009, the typical news site saw 50% of their unique traffic coming to their homepage, 20-25% from search, and 30-35% from story pages. Social was almost nonexistent. We're now seeing the homepage receive only 25% of inbound traffic, search with 30-35%, and the rest going to story pages, a huge portion of which is driven by social networks. The Atlantic said they're seeing 30-35% of their traffic coming from social environments. (via Tim O'Reilly)

Making innovation: Open hardware, personal fab and collaborative design

2012-05-11T21:00:00Z

MAKE's Hardware Innovation Workshop takes place May 15-16, at PARC in Palo Alto. The Workshop is a one-and-a-half day intensive introduction to the business of making and the makers who are creating these businesses.

Here are some of the topics we'll be discussing:

Open source hardware and software are providing standardized components on which to build new applications.
New fabrication tools are creating a rapid-prototyping revolution that makes iteration cheaper, faster, and easier.
Collaborative design practices are using new tools and tapping new kinds of expertise.
Options for manufacturing at scale are improving, as more and more of the process becomes automated.
Crowdfunding is helping launch new projects and providing funding to test out new product ideas.
Traditional investors are wary of hardware, but hardware-focused incubators hope to soften resistance by helping hardware startups become better prepared for investors.

As important as the topics are the makers who are taking the lead in creating innovative businesses and innovative platforms, often combining hardware and software with an open community.

Phil Torrone and Limor Fried of AdaFruit combine amazing engineering design with grassroots community building to create an innovative open-source hardware company located in the heart of Manhattan. This self-funded business continues to grow and grow, and it's the kind of success story you can read about in Wired magazine but still fly under the radar of many.

Massimo Banzi of Arduino has raised interest in microcontrollers to a new high, creating a platform for hobbyists, artists, designers and developers. Arduino is the brains of many maker projects, such as MakerBot and DIY Drones. Unexpectedly, it was designed and manufactured just outside Turin, Italy.

Ayah Bdeir of LittleBits has created a new interactive educational kit that teaches electronics. She has improved a basic design, iterated through several prototypes and now she's manufacturing at scale for a mass market.

Liam Casey of PCH International works with all kinds of companies who want to tap into the manufacturing capacity of China. He believes that is becoming easier for more people to make things, and that the interfaces to China's manufacturing companies are becoming easier to navigate.

Bunnie Huang, formerly of Chumby, is a hardware hacker extraordinaire. Now living in Singapore, he's especially familiar with sourcing parts from China as well as setting up manufacturing processes there. He's also an inspiring maker himself.

Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors, believes that collaborative design practices and the online tools that enable collaboration are making possible new ways to build anything. His focus is on building open source vehicles, and he's set up a microfactory in Chandler, AZ where you can go to build your own RallyFighter.

Caterina Mota of OpenMaterials believes that open source materials may create new opportunities for innovation.

Kai Backman, CEO of TinkerCad, worked on Google Docs but left Google after he started playing with a 3D printer. He believed that the software tools for 3D design were too complex for mere mortals to create things to make on a 3D printer so he co-founded TinkerCad, a browser-based 3D design tool.

Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk, has created a new consumer division to develop free 3D design tools and combine them with the robust online community of Instructables. He also finds time to work in his own workshop, where he helps kids make their own wooden baseball bats for a local Little League. He can make them in the traditional way on a lathe but he now can also make them on a supersized 5-axis CNC router.

Mark Hatch, CEO of Techshop, is busy creating large-scale workshops throughout the country. Starting in the Bay Area with three locations, a TechShop recently opened in Detroit, MI. What you may not know about TechShop is that it's becoming not just a place for hobbyists on weekends and evenings, it's become the go-to place for hardware entrepreneurs to build prototypes, and even do small-scale manufacturing.

Ted Hall, CEO of Shopbot, first built his own CNC machine so that he could build a wooden boat. He never really finished his boat but ShopBot tools are found in TechShops, Fab Labs and through a network of independent makers called 100K Garages.

Helen Zelman and Jeremy Conrad of Lemnos Labs and Ben Einstein of Bolt are both trying to help hardware entrepreneurs develop successful products and launch viable businesses.

John Diamatos of MakerBot Industries is the Director of Application Development. He's exploring the kinds of applications that will drive 3D printer sales in the home and office. It's one thing to have a 3D printer to print a few things for fun, but it's another to see it as a production tool for new designs and new products.

Allan Chochinov of Core77 is starting a new design program in the fall called Products by Design at the School for Visual Arts in New York City. This program, influenced by the fabrication tools and collaborative design practices of makers, will explore what we make, how we make and why we make it.

Brad Feld, co-founder of the Foundry Group, is the lead investor in MakerBot Industries and some other hardware startups. In a world of copy-cat investing, Brad is doing something very different.

Nick Pinkston of CloudFab began looking at automating manufacturing by creating software tools that eliminated costly design review. He believes the future of manufacturing in America is in building open source software that automates even more of the process from quoting all the way through to packaging.

Greg Borenstein, author of O'Reilly's "Making Things See," has been a leading experimenter in the open Kinect movement, developing 3D applications based on Kinect, Processing and Makerbot. The Kinect is a great example of a product that was developed for one purpose (gaming) while the development community has unlocked its potential for cool new applications in areas such as healthcare.

Alasdair Allan is an astrophysicist who specializes in remote sensing. He's the author of several O'Reilly books including " iOS Sensor Applications with Arduino." Alasdair will demo applications that integrate Arduino and the iPhone/iPad.

For the full listing of speakers and their bios, go to: speaker roster.

On Tuesday evening, we will host an opening reception and an innovation showcase of 25 hardware startups including several new 3D printer startups along with demos by companies like Autodesk, ShopBot, MakerBot, and more.

For complete information on the event and to register, go to: Hardware Innovation Workshop.

Maker Faire Bay Area follows this event on the weekend, May 19-20.

Lucene conference touches many areas of growth in search

2012-05-11T19:10:45Z

With a modern search engine and smart planning, web sites can provide visitors with a better search experience than Google. For instance, Google may well turn up interesting results if you search for a certain kind of shirt, but a well-designed clothing site can also pull up related trousers, skirts, and accessories. It's not Google's job to understand the intricate interrelationships of data on a particular web property, but the site's own team can constantly tune searches to reflect what the site has to offer and what its visitors uniquely need.

Hence the important of search engines like Solr, based on the Lucene library. Both are open source Apache projects, maintained by Lucid Imagination, a company founded to commercialize the underlying technology. I attended parts of Lucid Imagination's conference this week, Lucene Revolution, and found Lucene evolving in the ways much of the computer industry is headed.

Wait till they get big

In his opening remarks CEO Paul Doscher showed some stats from the sign-ups and indicated that many of the 350 attendees were new to Lucene and Solr. One third had less than one year of experience. This explains to me why turn-out for the regular tracks was higher than the new "big data" track on advanced processing and performance issues, which I expected to draw more participants. Speakers in the big data track had some fascinating applications to show off, suggesting that this is an example of the future not being equally distributed.

Thus, Mark Davis did a fast-pace presentation on the use of Solr along with Hadoop, , and systems hosting GPUs at the information processing firm Kitenga. A RESTful API from LucidWorks Enterprise gives Solr access to Hadoop to run jobs. Glenn Engstrand described how Zoosk, The "Romantic Social Network," keeps slow operations on the update side of the operation so that searches can be simple and fast. As in many applications, Solr at Zoosk pulls information from MySQL. Other tools they use include the High-speed ObjectWeb Logger (HOWL) to log transactions and RabbitMQ for auto-acknowledge messages. HOWL is also useful for warming Solr's cache with recent searches, because certain operations flush the cache.

Along these lines, Apache has released a replication tool called Solr Cloud that is supposed to make it much easier to manage sharding (partitioning) and multiple servers in Solr. Lucid Imagination used the show to announce their LucidWorks Big Data platform, now accepting Beta applicants, which will allow organizations to do pretty much what Davis described in his talk without having to configure all the tools on local systems. I suspect that first uses of this cloud service will be restricted to early adopters, but that next year both the "big data" presentations and LucidWorks Big Data will be popular.

The flexibility of a good search

Several presenters pointed out that Google has spoiled users and they expect every commercial site, health provider, or other major organization to provide a local site with Google-like features, including auto-completion and auto-suggestion, fuzzy searches and spelling correction ("Did you mean to search for...?"), and of course highly relevant "give me what I'm thinking of" search results.

Many companies offer search solutions--and O'Reilly actually has a book on another open source project with some very sophisticated back-end features, Introduction to Search with Sphinx--but Lucene with its strong Apache branding is the most popular open source solution, and (again according to Paul Doscher) probably the most popular independent search engine anywhere.

Sudarshan Gaikaiwari presented a talk on auto-completion, concentrating on geospatially informed results. For instance, if you enter "pi" into a search box, you may be presented with pizza joints, piano bars, and other popular searches within a few miles. Gaikaiwari achieved this with careful mining of log files and by creating a hidden prefix to the search term (for instance, "pi" can be altered to "times square new york city pi"). It's important to create the long prefix because the longer a search string is, the fewer results have to be returned and the quicker you can present suggested search items while the user is still typing. (To feel responsive, a site should present result to a user within 140 milliseconds.)

The geospatial information is retrieved through geohashes, a way of representing the world's grid as arbitrary strings. Shorter strings represent larger geographical areas, and as you add a character to the end of the string you zoom in on a smaller area. By a mixture of four-character and five-character strings, you can create a reasonable area in which to show local search results.

Some of the other interesting parts of Gaikaiwari's talk included:

Check each search string you recommend against the main search index to make sure that someone clicking on that search string will come up with at least one actual document. Users quickly come to distrust your recommendations if they try when and come up with an empty set.

Measure "time to first click" to check how good your recommendations are. This metric is valuable because it combines two important criteria: presenting suggestions to the user quickly and success in actually producing a suggestion the user likes. Gaikaiwari also listed several other metrics.

Interestingly, search engines such as Solr and Sphinx functioned as NoSQL replacements for relational databases (though usually used to offload the search function from these databases) long before the term NoSQL was invented. Although people don't tend to think of the search tools in that light, they do in fact work like NoSQL in that they perform specific functions more efficiently than a relational database can, and they sometimes compete with document stores like CouchDB and MongoDB. But search engines have evolved tremendously to intersect with the worlds of taxonomy and analytics. And now they're dealing with big enough data sets to require sharding and replication as well.

Publishing News: Another publisher ends its app fling

2012-05-11T18:00:00Z

Here are a few stories that caught my eye this week in the publishing space.

Move over apps, HTML5 is here

Last week, Jani Patokallio, publishing platform architect at Lonely Planet, explored the possibility that the silo platforms of ereaders and restrictive formats of ebooks would meet their demise at the hand of the web and HTML5. This week, apps are undergoing a similar treatment.

Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of MIT's Technology Review, reviewed the love affair publishers initially experienced with apps followed by their utter disappointment when app dreams didn't pan out. Looking at the iOS and Android apps that were developed for Technology Review, Pontin writes: "What went wrong? Everything." He describes the single-copy sales issues in iTunes, the subscription growing pains, Apple's "30 percent vigorish" and app development problems in general. But all that aside, he says the real app problem was more profound:

"When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn't really link. The apps were, in the jargon of information technology, 'walled gardens,' and although sometimes beautiful, they were small, stifling gardens. For readers, none of that beauty overcame the weirdness and frustration of reading digital media closed off from other digital media."

Pontin says all editorial content has been moved from the apps, which will soon be killed off, and that the website is being redesigned and optimized with HTML5, ala Financial Times.

The future of publishing has a busy schedule.
Stay up to date with Tools of Change for Publishing events, publications, research and resources. Visit us at oreilly.com/toc.

For B&N, balance is key

Antone Gonsalves at ReadWriteWeb took a look at Barnes & Noble's situation this week, wondering if the store can survive its brick-and-mortar and online co-existence. He says having three channels — physical stores, an online store and an ereader — is a great advantage, but that balancing the physical and online sales channels will be key to its survival. Gonsalves writes:

"Borders sold e-readers from Sony and Rakuten, maker of the Kobo, and had Amazon run its online store. With no connection to the online customer, Borders didn't have enough to survive. The bookseller went out of business last year. Barnes & Noble has not made the same mistakes as its one-time rival, and its current strategy actually plays into the habits of book readers."

Peter Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex Group, noted to Gonsalves that people who own ereaders also buy print books: "They're not just pure-play e-readers; they are living in the print world, as well."

Gonsalves says moving into international markets is Barnes & Noble's next hurdle and that the recently announced Microsoft partnership will help facilitate that:

"Under the deal, Microsoft will develop a Nook application for Windows 8, which is expected to ship this year, Lynch told the financial news agency Bloomberg. The app will take Barnes & Noble's digital books to consumers in Europe, Asia and Latin America, according to Lynch. Along with selling e-books, Barnes & Noble will also have to sell Nooks, which it hopes to place on the shelves of retailers in other countries."

Amazon isn't playing around

Amazon hired another publishing industry heavy hitter this week: Sara Nelson will join Amazon's team as the editorial director of Amazon.com Books. Publisher's Weekly reports:

"In her new role, Nelson is expected to give a fresh look and voice to the books home page, which may include writing a column and talking up books both on the site and at public events ... 'I am thrilled to have the opportunity to expand the content on Amazon.com and to bring my voice to this web site visited by millions of passionate readers,' said Nelson in a statement."

Some in the industry are accusing Nelson of going to the "dark side," much like they did when Larry Kirshbaum joined Amazon Publishing. Laura Hazard Owen, who looks into some of Nelson's past work and publishing contributions over at Paid Content, writes, "If some critics consider Nelson's move a bargain with the devil, it's undeniable that her new position will put her in touch with plenty of readers to create and nurture ..."

Related:

HTML5: The platform-agnostic key to the future of publishing

A sensible look at HTML5 and publishing

Tip for B&N: Don't just follow Amazon

Amazon is, indeed, a disruptive publishing competitor

More Publishing Week in Review coverage

O'Reilly Radar - Insight, analysis, and research about emerging technologies.

Velocity Profile: Justin Huff

How did you get into web operations and performance?

What is your most memorable project?

What's the toughest problem you've had to solve?

What tools and techniques do you rely on most?

Who do you follow in the web operations and performance world?

What is your web operations and performance super power?

A federal judge learned to code

How to start a successful business in health care at Health 2.0 conference

The chicken and egg of big data solutions

Four short links: 16 May 2012

Profile of the Data Journalist: The Data News Editor

Where do you work now? What is a day in your life like?

How did you get started in data journalism? Did you get any special degrees or certificates?

Did you have any mentors? Who? What were the most important resources they shared with you?

What does your personal data journalism "stack" look like? What tools could you not live without?

What data journalism project are you the most proud of working on or creating?

Where do you turn to keep your skills updated or learn new things?

Why are data journalism and "news apps" important, in the context of the contemporary digital environment for information?

DIY learning: Schoolers, Edupunks, and Makers challenge education as we know it

Improving schooling

Re-specifying education

Making to learn and learning to make

Sharing the experience at Maker Faire

John Allspaw on DevOps

Four short links: 15 May 2012

Why I can't shake my ereader

Four short links: 14 May 2012

Making innovation: Open hardware, personal fab and collaborative design

Lucene conference touches many areas of growth in search

Wait till they get big

The flexibility of a good search

Top Stories: May 7-11, 2012

Publishing News: Another publisher ends its app fling

Move over apps, HTML5 is here

For B&N, balance is key

Amazon isn't playing around