Talks and Stuff: Carmack Keynote, Approval Tests, Pausless GC, History
Hmm, I ‘m not in the mood for writing anything technical right know. Instead I just share some interesting links to talks, blog-posts and podcasts. Here we go:
- QuakeCon 2011 John Carmack Keynote: I really love John Carmack keynotes. It’s just fun to listen about the development, the tradeoffs issues etc. behind such giant projects like a triple A game.
- Llewellyn Falco on Approval Tests: I’ve never heard of this testing approach, but it looks really interesting. The basic idea: Instead of writing complex assert statements you run your software, then check of the result looks sane. If the result looks sane to a human being, then you mark the test as approved. Perfect for testing legacy code and integration tests. I will try this stuff out soon.
- Another talk from the Azul Guys: Java without the GC Pauses: Keeping Up with Moore’s Law and Living in a Virtualized World. Basically a talk about most Java / .NET apps don’t use up the available memory and how the Azul Zing VM fixes this issue. I hope that other VM vendors follow this path.
- Girls Go Geek… Again! Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong! Nice blog post about the computer science history.
That’s it for now =).
That post about women and computer science was really interesting. I suppose it goes to show just how much culture and gender roles influence career decisions, far more than any “natural” gender-based aptitude. Labeling it “computer science” and putting it in the engineering building at the university was all it took to drive women out.