Vivek Haldar

CES is upon us.

I recently finished reading “The Distraction Addiction” by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang.

Here are the most popular posts of 2013.

Millennials were born from early 1980s to the early 2000s.

Cal Newport, an author and blogger for whom I have great respect, recently wrote about how he allows new technological tools into his life: in an age of personal technological revolution, we all need a more explicit philosophy for adopting tools.

Nicholas Carr was kind enough to respond to my post about automation as it applies to software engineers: Software writers themselves don’t seem immune from the new de-skilling wave.

What keeps me coming back to the writing of Nicholas Carr is that he splits me in two, violently agreeing and disagreeing at the same time.

I admire the writing of Malcolm Gladwell because he picks eclectic topics to delve into, peppers his narrative with memorable anecdotes, and weaves it with just enough pop science to make me feel like I’m learning something new, without making it heavy en…

The book Designing Programmes, by Karl Gerstner, was published in 1964.

A recent EconTalk podcast interviewed Jagdish Bhagwati about his new book chronicling the economic path of India, particularly since the 1991 reforms.

I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time fiddling with the theme and look of this blog, and so I decided to see what happens if I try to automate my experimentation.

Inspired by Alex Payne’s rules.

Tim Hopper recently posted a series of interviews with folks from both academia and industry, posing this question to them.

I just finished reading Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants.

Jeff Rothenberg might very well have written everything there was to write about the topic of digital longevity and preservation.

I just finished reading this paper1 where the author embeds himself with a group of swimmers and tries to understand how they move up (or not) through the levels.

I feel all cheesy and content-market-ish just writing that headline, but hear me out.

In no particular order, brief summaries of some papers I’ve been reading lately on the topic of programming and distributed/remote teams.

How do you reconcile the consistent cries of “not enough STEM workers” from industry with some recent studies that claim that there are plenty?

I am an unabashed fan of the American National Parks Service, not just because of the precious beauty of the parks themselves, but because of the rangers who work there.

I’m aghast that a few people read what I write, so it was a treat to see Nicola Iarocci quote some of my writing on remote work and asynchronous working in a recent talk he gave about taking his company completely remote.

Clearly there has been a renaissance lately in long-form publishing on the web.

tl;dr: whether you know it or not, a non-trivial fraction of your work is remote.

This piece by Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman did the rounds recently.

This sounds like a trivial observation, but it took me a long time to fully understand this: in the long-term, asset allocation affects outcomes with high probability.

One of the worries I hear most from fresh grads going into industry is whether they’ll be “stuck doing maintenance projects.”

John Regehr asks: If the cost of memory safety bugs in C/C++ codes is significant, and if solutions are available, why aren’t we using them in production systems?

I’ve been a fan of Hugh MacLeod’s work since the early 2000s, back when he was actually making cartoons on the backs of business cards and putting them up on gapingvoid.com.

I recently came across this paper1 that carries out an experiment to examine how early voting on a comment in an HN/Reddit-style website affects its final score.

As James Snell points out, apart from all the new features like multiplexing and flow control, the biggest visible change in the HTTP 2.0 spec is that it is now a binary protocol, not a text-based one like HTTP 1.1.

I’m fascinated by the New Aesthetic.

Apropos my last post on the organic new aesthetic, the new Moto X phone has a number of options for wooden back panels.

Leo Meyerovich has some hard data on the factors that affect programming language adoption, in a paper in the upcoming OOPSLA 2013.

Do you remember when software came in boxes, on discs that you had to pop into your computer and install?

When I was a graduate student, it struck me as particularly strange that we were represented by a union, the Union of Auto Workers (UAW).

C++ keeps marching down the road to be more higher level and “scripty”.

It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure. – Clay Shirky Nobody tells you how to handle email in a large modern organization.

I recently turned thirty-five.

Gloria Mark et al have done the unthinkable: empirically observed people working in a modern environment without email for a whole work week: We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an o…

This is a follow-up from my post about synchronous work.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to call the National Park System America’s best idea.

TL;DR: Working synchronously by default (as opposed to asynchronous working) is lazy and unproductive.

Wired takes a deep look at the rising uptake of meditation and mindfulness in Silicon Valley tech companies, and comes away somewhat discomfited at the way ancient Eastern philosophy is being remarketed for the privileged technorati.

I want to expand on what I meant in the following tweet a few days ago.

Since I moved entirely to ChromeOS I’ve had to rethink my backup strategy.

The first HTTP connection was made in November 1989 (Tim Berners-Lee had first proposed the idea in March of that year).

From the same article I was talking about in my previous post, a fascinating look at how videogames are a hook into CS, but it’s not how much you play games, but how you play them, that affects whether it steers you towards CS: Betsy DiSalvo (now an assis…

Via this article in the latest CACM, I came across the work of Mike Hewner, who studies CS education, in particular the issue of what students think the field is about.

When lambdas make it into C++, it’s fair to say that the functional languages camp has “won”.

I find a clear pattern emerging in the way I use various computing devices.