Software Is the New Hardware

I’m probably late on the wagon with this, but I just discovered that standardized protocol interfaces are fast becoming commonplace – and I’m not talking about the network-side interface, I’m talking about the application-side interfaces, also known as APIs, or should I say open APIs. APIs used to be a matter of taste and design, pride and prestige; they were known to make or break an SDK. All this is about to change, as APIs are being standardized, and SDKs (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 25th, 2009  |  Filed under Development, Standardization
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While You Were Away

Google broke our RSS feed. FeedBurner, which we are using now, is being moved over to the Google “platform”, which caused some problems involving their MyBrand service, Yahoo Pipes and a bunch of other minor inconveniences. Don’t know, don’t care. Remember what I said once about strict decoding and all that stuff? I lied. That might be good for signaling, but for the media, for something that humans are supposed to be consuming in the end, accept anything that you (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 24th, 2009  |  Filed under Miscellaneous
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About The Intel Threading Tools, Our SIP Stack, and Me

[I knew that our SIP team was working for a while on multi-core optimization. So when there were signs of oil there, with some very promising results, I asked Ofer Goren, a software engineer in the SIP Stack team, and one of those given the optimization task, to write a few words on the process. You might even appreciate the work we do here for our customers, toiling around with analysis tools.] “Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive” says Jeff (read more...)

By Ofer Goren  |  March 18th, 2009  |  Filed under Development
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Five Bad Medicines for a Sick Code

I’m now maintaining and developing code that was out of my hands for a long time, and I found an interesting phenomenon I call “bad medicine”. The developer in charge of the code while I was gone knew something was wrong, but could not figure out how to fix it. So he added a crutch here and a splint there to keep the sick code “breathing” and quickly moved along. Let me rant a bit about my experience with Programmer (read more...)

By Ran Arad  |  March 4th, 2009  |  Filed under Development
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