Thursday, March 31, 2011

A very compact representation of $20000

No, they are not mine. Picked up this picture at a collector's forum. Each one is worth $2-3k...

Friday, March 11, 2011

Looking for awesome testers

My team is looking for very senior test engineers. The testers on our team do more than writing tests - alongside the devs they are responsible for the health of production instance, so the job is similar to that of Google SREs in many (but not all) respects. By the way, we are looking for Google SREs of all levels as well, in the more traditional SRE roles.

If you are interested, please send me your resume (mailto:resumes@solyanik.com).

Are you working on one of the most important problems in your field? If not, come join the team that is.


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As Web 2.0 matures, a new paradigm is being born - massively distributed development, where a typical application runs on hundreds, thousands, sometimes tens of thousands computers at the same time. A new software stack that resembles familiar operating system concepts is being built to support this model.
Would you like to participate in the creation of the Web 2.0 framework?
The Manageability Services Group (MSG) builds components that massively distributed applications live and die by - deployment, automation, monitoring, discovery, etc. We have it all - complex algorithmic tasks, opportunity to write a lot of code, potential to influence the entire industry, and, last but not least, soon to be running millions of computers!

Interested?

We’re looking for strong algorithmic skills, native fluency in C#, and a lot of passion - proven by shipping real software! A SDET on our team is responsible for managing the design, implementation and automation of test cases to ensure high quality solutions are shipping across large data centers.
Qualifications:

Interested candidates should possess a thorough understanding of the software development lifecycle from specification, through implementation and testing, to final deployment and operation.
Passion for distributed systems, fault tolerance and recovery, and geo-distributed solutions
8+ years of Software Development experience working with a structured programming language (C++, C#, Java, etc.)
6+ years of broad testing experience required
Deep knowledge of test engineering and software development required.
Excellent troubleshooting skills
Knowledge of networking (tracing, packet sniffers, etc.) a big plus
Communications excellence including cross-team collaboration, presentation and documentation
Demonstrated technical leadership, great communication skills and a history of driving for results is required.
BS or MS in Computer Science or related areas is preferred and we will take experience and a proven track record over other requirements

Intellectual property is now infrastructure

Wondered why the creme-de-la-creme of the modern web companies such as Google and Facebook do not seem to value software as a form of market lock-in? Google is, and has always been, publishing lots of articles containing detailed information - and source code - for their core systems.

MapReduce, Bigtable, GFS, Chubby, Closure, Chrome, Android et al would be the major source of competitive advantage 10 years ago, and now most of the key technologies that comprise Google are either open source or public domain.

Why?

Because Google does not derive its competitive advantage from software. They are betting that even if someone could replicate their technologies, they would never be able to replicate their datacenters. Incidentally, there is far less information about both hardware and software that runs it (try, for example, googling for "Google Borg").

It appears that the infrastructure - hardware and software - is becoming the modern answer to the open source. After the open source sucked the value out of the software as THE value proposition, the competitive advantage had so move somewhere, and infrastructure was the obvious way to go.

You move, FSF?

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Caviar! It's jumping off the shelf.

The owner of a specialty food store on Manhattan's Upper East Side—Maureen's Passion—was touting the top-income tax cuts the GOP had shoved into Obama's compromise. "It all turned around when the tax bill passed," he'd told a financial news website. "Caviar! It's jumping off the shelf."


http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/reagan-anniversary-david-stockman