Turns out this is relatively helpful:

jmap -histo:live <pid> > dump.out

and the advice around sampling this over time and then comparing diffs. WAY better than analzying heap dumps.

Bunch of tips on memory usage and Lucene / Solr.

Great post on Lucene / Solr + memory usage.

jmap -permstat <pid> Could be an interesting tool for us on the cloud since we're going small on the ol' permgen settings.

Yes.

Quote: "This is, after all, the way of our new product-based civilization — in order to participate as a citizen of the social web, you must yourself manufacture content. Progress requires that forms must be filled. Thus it is a critical choice of any adult as to where they will perform their free labor."

Awesome.

Nice hack.

Great design finally coming to Android.

Lego plans

A look resource size graphs of a bunch of sites, surprised to see Twitter up there at the top... err bottom.

Great list of books for kids.

Five whys applied to business.

Quote: "We must recover our sanity where 100 million users does not represent the goal criteria of every new service. We must recover the mindset where a service used by 10,000 users, or 1,000 users, or 100 users is *admired, respected, and praised* for its actual success. All of those could be sustainable, profitable ventures. If TechCrunch doesn't care to write about you, all the better."

Quote: "The great entrepreneurs I know work incredibly hard at creating environments that are motivating. They don’t pound away at the specific task of “motivating people”, rather they pay attention to creating context, removing barriers, being supportive, putting the right people in the room, and leading by doing. All of these things create a context in which people are motivated."

That’s when I learned an important truth about news. Whether it’s TechCrunch, The New York Times, Wired, or Fox News: their job isn’t to educate or inform you, it’s to entertain you. You’re not reading them because you think you’ll be more knowledgable and informed, you’re reading them because you want to be distracted – because consuming has a more immediate reward than creating.

MUST. NOT. LUST.

On OAuth, security and apps.

“David Ogilvy, internal memo: “How to Write,” 1982:
The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches. Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well. Here are 10 hints:
1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.
6. Check your quotations.
7. Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning – and then edit it.
8. If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
9. Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
10. If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.”

yep.

Quote: "The first thing you have to do when you join a new team is check your ego at the door." Good practice for anything you do in life.

Really interesting, haven't heard this one before... totally agree that spending a short amount of time thinking about what you have accomplished and what you want to accomplish in the coming day / week is a great idea... but as a substitute for meeting with a manager, not sure.

Quote: "You know, Westmoreland made all of us officers write our own obituaries during Tet, when we thought The Cong were gonna end it all right there. And, once we clued into the fact that life is finite, the thought of losing it didn't scare us anymore. The end comes no matter what, the only thing that matters is how do you wanna go out, on your feet or on your knees? I bring that lesson to this job. I act, knowing that someday this job will end, no matter what. You should do the same. "

Some good stuff on email / smtp.

Quote: ".. Also, clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five." My new motto: life is all about hugs and high fives.

Rands on design.

A strong TODO

"Honing circuits"

Reinforcements of the culture at Facebook via posters.

Real-time 360 feedback.

Great blog post on recruiting engineers.

Great article if you're about to buy a car.

Lots of good stuff in here.

Email dkim / senderID / spf tools.

Awesome idea, signed up for beta.

Super cool looking backyard fire pits.

Great list of stuff to work through when hiring designers.

Lightweight reporting / metrics framework.

Handy ui tool.

A great recruiting site for engineering done by Linkedin.

Old but useful.

SO doing great stuff, LOVED the slides that talked about being able to *write in English*. Agree that that's an overlooked skill.

Purchased.

Nice tool for REST dev against deployed software.

More from Adam Nash on product management.

Great summary of what a PM can / should be doing.

Quote: "But it seems to me that solitude is the very essence of leadership. The position of the leader is ultimately an intensely solitary, even intensely lonely one. However many people you may consult, you are the one who has to make the hard decisions. And at such moments, all you really have is yourself." Epic essay, well worth the time.

Quote: "The purpose of our business is first to make money and second enjoy what we’re working on." Seems like this sentiment is coming up more and more... or maybe it's just that I notice it more.

Cool poster of Oregon stuff.

Lots of the same stuff we've seen at Jive... and then you hit 150 engineers.

Quote: "First, organizations that consider jagged resumes have clear ideas of what high points they must see. Teach for America looks for perseverance. The New England Patriots look for a deep-seated desire to play football, not just to be a famous athlete. Linear Technology looks for tinkerers, who have been experimenting with electrical circuits since childhood."

Would be super interesting to know how each of the above organizations measure / look for the things they're interested in.

To buy.

Quote: "So if your goal is to enrich the Arringtons of the world while maybe, if you win the lottery, scooping some of the groundscore that they overlooked, then by all means, bust your ass while the bankers and speculators cheer you on. Instead of that, I recommend that you do what you love because you love doing it. If that means long hours, fantastic. If that means leaving the office by 6pm every day for your underwater basket-weaving class, also fantastic."

Mmmmmmm.

Window management on osx

Window management on osx.

Lots of good stuff in the comments.

Great answer / insight from Netflix Engineering VP on ratings systems.

Super interesting tool for i18n / translations.

Some cool art for kids.

So much better than the default Google Reader style.

Not sure if this is the first instance of a mention of a "peanut butter strategy", but it's a great memo

Quote: "Time is a great indication of priority".

Similar in spirit to the Joel Test, except more organizational / people based.

Yes, yes I did just buy all the parts for this.

So many good quotes in this essay.

The Anti-Library.... thanks Chris!

I like "bike shedding" as a name better, but a whole law, that's cool too.

Steve’s final words were:

OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.

Really interesting stuff if you're into performance tuning.

One of Warren Buffet’s most famous quotes is that “In business, I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable ‘moats’.” An “economic castle” is a great business, and the “unbreachable moat” is the strategy or market dynamic that heightens the barriers-to-entry and makes it difficult or ideally impossible to compete with, or gain access to, the economic castle.

Wet streets cause rain.

...organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Have thought for a long time that Portland would benefit from having a world class / larger university like Boulder, Silicon Valley and Boston do... but then they also share a common trait of having a lot of money. Either way, interesting discussion.

Totally agree with this blog post. Quote: "The mechanisms of social software make it easier than ever. You can Favorite things on Twitter and on Flickr. There are Facebook Like buttons and Google +1 buttons everywhere. And of course, you can leave positive feedback in comments or just send someone an email telling them that you appreciate their work. For more on that, I’d recommend Anil Dash’s post All in Favor. In the real world giving people a nice comment is easy enough if you try."

Yegge on platforms.

Instagram guys on scaling + Postgres