Philip Greenspun is probably best known to other geeks for his Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." Amongst the general public, he is most famous for founding ArsDigita and suffering the subsequent miseries that came from accepting venture capital.… Read more
Alan Cooper helped to debug the most widely-used PC language of the late seventies and early eighties, BASIC-E, and, with Keith Parsons, developed C-BASIC. He then went on to create Tripod, which morphed eventually into Visual Basic in 1991. Alan remains enthusiastic and interested in development with strong views on Agile and Pair Programming.… Read more
Why do programmers work best at night? Is this related to the idea that drinking alcohol improves cognitive ability? Is programming a young person's game? How do you tackle spaghetti code and avoid job-burnout? Swizek Teller has achieved fame in providing a wry commentary on these questions, and the way that computers have come to dominate our lives.… Read more
Grant Fritchey, The Scary DBA, has now taken the leap from being a Simple-Talk author and FoRG(Friend of Red Gate) to being employed by Red Gate as 'product evangelist'. As Bob Cramblitt finds out, it means that Grant gets more time to do what he enjoys doing; talking and writing about SQL Server topics that fascinate him, such as query tuning, execution plans, performance monitoring and backups.
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Corrin Lakeland's busy role as a Data Manager includes supervising the work of all database development. Although he was already a keen user of SQL Compare, the arrival of SQL Source Control came as a godsend to him. He explains why.… Read more
Ted Krueger is well known for his 'Less-Than Dot' website. He is a SQL Server MVP who has been working in development and database administration for over 13 years. He was one of the finalists to the Exceptional DBA of the Year Award for 2010… Read more
Learning .NET doesn't have to be dull: not when there are geeks like like Carl Fraklin and Richard Campbell with the wit and ability to talk interestingly about it. If you don't listen to their podcasts on .NET topics, then maybe you're missing out on a great way of whiling away the time spent commuting between home and work.… Read more
As the winner of the Exceptional DBA Awards 2010 is announced, we take a moment to recognize last year's winner Josef Richberg. We sent Richard Morris to meet Josef to find out what has happened in the past year, and if life has changed for the Exceptional DBA of 2009.… Read more
Tracy Hamlin has been elected by judges and the SQL Server community as the Exceptional DBA of 2010. The annual awards program, hosted by SQL Server Central and sponsored by Red Gate Software, drew the largest number of community votes in its three-year history. In the interview, Simple-Talk contributor Bob Cramblitt talks to Tracy to uncover the essence of an exceptional DBA.… Read more
Almost certainly, you use the results of Roy Fielding's work every day. After all, he was one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification, was active in developing HTML and the URI, defined REST, and remains one of the directors of the Apache Software Foundation, having co-founded the Apache HTTP Server that runs the bulk of the words webservers. … Read more
If you could design an Exchange email archiver from scratch, what would you do differently and how would you bring it to maturity? Bob Cramblitt talks with three principals from the new Exchange Server Archiver 3.0 development team and gets the inside story on the soul of a new archiver.… Read more
Erland is best known for his famous SQL Server site http://www.sommarskog.se/. It is plain, it has eight articles in it, it is short on jokes: However, it is hugely popular and one of the great 'essential' SQL Server sites. We sent Richard Morris to find out more about Erland, and he discovered a diligent and energetic teacher and mentor in the SQL Server Community.… Read more
When anyone mentions 'Kernighan and Ritchie', we all know what they are referring to: that brief book that introduced the C language to programmers, and set a high standard for all subsequent books on computer languages. Now over thirty years later it is still in print and translated into over 20 languages, being required reading for undergraduates. We sent Richard Morris to interview Professor Brian Kernighan… Read more
Simon Peyton Jones is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research's lab in Cambridge. Although he is best known as the developer of the definitive Haskell Compiler, his influence on the development of the new generation of functional languages such as F# has been profound. He has also been in the forefront of the development of parallel programming using Software Transactional memory. We sent Richard Morris across the road to find out more.… Read more
For our first feature on working DBAs and their lives, we chose Grant Fritchey, the self-styled Scary DBA, who has been so successful in the past year with his books and presentations. How does he manage to pack so much into his life? we sent Richard Morris to find out. … Read more
The development of Object-oriented programming, the windowing User-interface, Ethernet and the Laptop all had essential contributions from a brilliant, visionary, former professional Jazz and Rock guitarist. Alan Kay. His second career as a computer scientist led to him being the creative catalyst at Xerox, Atari and Apple. Alan is driven by the vision of the computer's potential role in education, to build a better society.
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Occasionally, readers of Simple-Talk will ask quizzically if the 'Geek of the Week' that the editors have chosen really is a true 'geek'. Nobody could ever ask that about Craig Newmark, the founder of the famous website 'CraigsList'. The site is uncompromisingly geeky in attitude, spartan in appearance but immensely popular, and supported by an army of enthusiasts. One can say exactly the same about the admirable Craig Newmark himself. … Read more
With economic doom and gloom all around him, Richard Morris decides to seek advice before starting a business. Who better, we suggest, than Ken Blanchard, the relentlessly optimistic purveyor of uplifting materials to the wannabe entrepreneurs, and author of the best-selling 'One Minute Manager'. We sent him of into the rain in his trilby to interview Ken and infuse himself with some get-up-and-go… Read more
