cwinters

I think you'd be better served by looking at his CPAN area [1] where you'll find this ~9 year old module (among others) is nicely formatted and highly readable [2]

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~chromatic/

[2] http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/CHROMATIC/Class-Roles-0.30/li...

Plus: reinventing date/time without using (or even referencing) Joda? Ouch.

True, but the gap is much, much larger between JDK Date/Time classes and Joda vs that between Joda and JSR-310.

Given the author's reported experience I'm surprised there aren't more posts from him on the mailing list (http://altair.cs.oswego.edu/mailman/listinfo/concurrency-int...) where this library, and all the other juc changes, have been discussed for years.

Have you tried to go through this process? Amazon seems to have done a good deal of work to ensure its servers and practices are HIPAA-compliant: http://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2009/04/06/whitepa...

I think, as you allude, that the primary issue is not technical but behavioral. In the area of healthcare I work in (nursing homes), quite a few organizations have their data hosted elsewhere. Sometimes it's through the vendor, sometimes it's with a third-party service. I don't see that big a leap of faith to Amazon from this.

Etsy (not surprising since John Allspaw from flickr is head of ops):

http://www.southsearepublic.org/article/2340/read/etsys_cont...

Medical dictation is a success for recognition, but it's important to remember that no such system can function by itself. Instead, they're often advertised as making the human transcriptionist's job easier -- reducing the number and type of fixes a human has to make when correcting the dictation results.

True for some patterns, but not all. Unit of Work, for example, is a useful abstraction no matter what framework or language you're using. (It's not a GoF pattern, but it was brought up in the OP.)

I agree that everything is leaky abstractions. The lesson I get from the idea is to assess the probability of leaks occurring and the risks they present when they do. Some of the ORM ones that the author mentions are pretty onerous.

Anybody else get a kick of the 'Oracle/Agile' bubble on slide 41?

Publication date of 1984: 1949. Bad writing is bad writing.

1) Languages and tools should be highlighted if they're exceptional -- e.g., I probably don't need to hear that you used SQL to interact with a database, but if you implemented a set of complex views in T-SQL that's useful.

2) ...which means you need to list your skills somewhere. I tend to categorize mine for easier scanning (languages, databases, frameworks, build infrastructure) but YMMV. If something sticks out there I'll ask about it -- "how did you find the experience of implementing a maven plugin?"

3) In the vein of not annoying people who read your resume, name the file you send "FirstName_LastName_resume.pdf" rather than "resume.pdf". Attention to detail matters, and people wind up dumping resumes into a directory with others.

Anyone using emacs would be well served by the Kinesis Ergo keyboard -- Ctrl and Atl (and a bunch of others) are at your superstrong thumbs, not your wimpy pinky:

http://kinesis-ergo.com/contoured.htm

I've had a kinesis keyboard for ~9 years, and after using it for a few weeks I thought it should be required for any emacs user. Putting ctrl-alt (and enter) under your strongest digits just makes so much sense.

If you're walking around for 10 hours that's 50 photos an hour. Given a conservative four photos per shot, that's only ~12 actual shots per hour, or one every five minutes. Doesn't seem like 'looking down the view finder' to me.

And knowing Tom, he probably walked around for 12 hours :-)