Terry Coatta

Node at LinkedIn: The Pursuit of Thinner, Lighter, Faster

Node.js, the server-side JavaScript-based software platform used to build scalable network applications, has been all the rage among many developers for the past couple of years, although its popularity has also managed to enrage some others, who have unleashed a barrage of negative blog posts to point out its perceived shortcomings. Still, while new and untested, Node continues to win more converts.

The (not so) Hidden Computer

Ubiquitous computing may not have arrived yet, but ubiquitous computers certainly have. The sustained improvements wrought by the fulfillment of Moore’s law have led to the use of microprocessors in a vast array of consumer products. A typical car contains 50 to 100 processors. Your microwave has one or maybe more. They’re in your TV, your phone, your refrigerator, your kids’ toys, and in some cases, your toothbrush.

Hootsuite: In Pursuit of Reactive Systems

It has become apparent how critical frameworks and standards are for development teams when using microservices. People often mistake the flexibility microservices provide with a requirement to use different technologies for each service. Like all development teams, we still need to keep the number of technologies we use to a minimum so we can easily train new people, maintain our code, support moves between teams, and the like.

Automated QA Testing at EA: Driven by Events

To millions of game geeks, the position of QA (quality assurance) tester at Electronic Arts must seem like a dream job. But from the company’s perspective, the overhead associated with QA can look downright frightening, particularly in an era of massively multiplayer games.

A Conversation with Erik Meijer and Jose Blakeley

To understand more about LINQ and ORM and why Microsoft took this approach, we invited two Microsoft engineers closely involved with their development, Erik Meijer and Jos Blakeley, to speak with Queue editorial board member Terry Coatta.

Corba: Gone but (Hopefully) Not Forgotten

Back in the June 2006 issue of Queue, Michi Henning wrote a very good condensed history of CORBA and discussed how some of its technical limitations contributed to its downfall. While those limitations certainly aided CORBA’s demise, there is a very widespread notion that the ultimate cause was the ascendance of Web Services, a notion that is compounded with the further belief that Web Services’ dominance of the distributed computing landscape is indicative of its technical superiority to the systems that preceded it, such as CORBA and DCOM.

Traipsing Through the QA Tools Desert

The Jeremiahs of the software world are out there lamenting, “Software is buggy and insecure!” Like the biblical prophet who bemoaned the wickedness of his people, these malcontents tell us we must repent and change our ways. But as someone involved in building commercial software, I’m thinking to myself, “I don’t need to repent. I do care about software quality.” Even so, I know that I have transgressed. I have shipped software that has bugs in it. Why did I do it? Why can’t I ship perfect software all the time?