Year: 2013

GitHub’s Data Challenge II winners announced

GitHub, being a massive data store, is constantly looking for new and improved ways of extracting knowledge from its data.

In April we announced the second annual GitHub data challenge.

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After receiving some amazing entries in the previous challenge, we were excited to see what people would discover with another year of data. The results blew us away: we saw many more entrants and novel applications of our data. GitHubbers ranked their favorite entries, and after tallying the votes, we’re happy to announce the top 3 entries for the 2013 GitHub data challenge.

The second place (Popular Convention by Outsider) and third place (open source contributions by location by David Fischer) winners are very nice.  But the first place winner is truly amazing (The Open Source Report Card, by Dan Foreman-Mackey).  It’s an excellent combination of data crunching with beautiful presentation.  Of course, you’ll need some publicly visible repositories and contributions to see anything interesting, but once you do, it’s quite impressive.  Have a look at mine, for example.

Google adds QUIC protocol to latest Chrome build, delivering HTTP over UDP

Google adds QUIC protocol to latest Chrome build, delivering HTTP over UDP

Here are the QUIC highlights Google wants to emphasize right now:

  • High security similar to TLS.
  • Fast (often 0-RTT) connectivity similar to TLS Snapstart combined with TCP Fast Open.
  • Packet pacing to reduce packet loss.
  • Packet error correction to reduce retransmission latency.
  • UDP transport to avoid TCP head-of-line blocking.
  • A connection identifier to reduce reconnections for mobile clients.
  • A pluggable congestion control mechanism.

In other words, QUIC is yet another protocol that Google is building to help speed up the Web. It has already done so notably with its SPDY protocol, which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol.

What’s the dark side of Silicon Valley?

I’ve been keeping an eye on this Quora question for a while now.  Indeed, we mostly hear about all the greatness of the Silicon Valley, but there are much be a few downsides to living and working there.  What are they?  There are many great answers in the thread.  Some are more insightful than others.  One particular bit that I liked is this one:

Sh!tty technology. This one might surprise people. Aren’t we in the center of technology? Well, here’s the truth. 95 percent of these so-called startups are marketing experiments that (a) don’t need great technology and (b) have to execute fast, which means they pile on the technical debt.

Once again, it’s been a very long time since I pla…

Once again, it’s been a very long time since I played Quake 3.  Today, had a duel with a colleague.  Plain old Quake 3 with no mods, no configs, no tweaking, no warm-up.  My eyes were tearing, hands shaking, heart racing, but I won none-the-less – 20:2!  Even managed to squeeze a humiliation in there.  Old school FTW!