LibArtTech

This morning a fascinating article showed up in my RSS feed on how technology is changing divorce. I encourage you to go read it over at the NY Times , but the quick summary is that things like texting and email have made face-to-face conversations less required in a divorce situation. That can end up being beneficial in situations with kids, since the chance of having a big argument in front of the children during an exchange or in a phone call become more rare. As someone who is divorced with joint custody of my kids, I can say with first hand experience that it works. Firing off a quick text to coordinate scheduling or letting the other parent know about an upcoming event, are fast and easy. As talked about in the article, having the children have their own cell phones is also a great idea, since the parents can talk to their kids with quick calls and messages without having to deal with the ex-spouse. However, there are certain areas where technology hasn't quite caught up

I recently sent an email at work, that talked a lot about some of the more academic sides of "infrastructure". Particularly the notion of where infrastructure gets it's direction and workload from. So I thought I'd share a few of those thoughts here. Infrastructure is a bit of a weird beast. It's a foundational piece of any technology deployment, but in most cases it isn't the "focus" of the deployment. Infrastructure is both independent-yet-dependent. It stands at a crossroads between two distinct worlds. First, infrastructure is independent, in the sense that it is agnostic. It can be built in a similar fashion if you're deploying a bookstore, financial application, music player, or blog. There are general concepts, principles and tactics (see The HiSSS of Infrastructure series...) that are universal to whatever application you are building and deploying. So by that standard, infrastructure is a thing unto itself. But yet, infrastructure

As most of the world is aware, last week was pretty rough for the East Coast of the United States. Hurricane Sandy left a trail of destruction through one of the most populous regions of our country, and even today, people have yet to fully recover from this incredible event. I have some personal connections to this event, since my boss, and many of my co-workers are stationed in our NYC offices. Over the past week, a lot of meetings have started with questions like, "Are you doing OK? Do you have power yet?" The business of building a software product continued, but at the back of everyone's mind were questions about the safety of those we worked with. For many of us, technology has become an embedded part of our lives. On any given day, I "chat" with people in two or three different timezones, hundreds of miles apart from me. Both in my personal life, and in my professional work. The internet, and our gadgets and apps, make this a simple proposition. Someo