alek blogs

Time is the scarcest resource

Time is the scariest resource and it should be treated as the most important factor when considering any task. From interview with Jim Gray:

(...) You see this today. Two groups start; one group uses an easy-to-use system, and another uses a not-so-easy-to-use system. The first group gets done first, and the competition is over. The winners move forward and the other guys go home.

That situation is now happening in the Web services space. People who have better tools win.(...)

However it is also important to not simplify the problem we try to solve or we have something very easy-to-use but useless ...

He also talks about phenomenon of scale when doing software development and I find this estimate quite interesting:

David Patterson: What do you think is happening with databases in terms of open source? What is the Linux of databases?

Jim Gray: I think it's exciting. Very small teams built the early database systems. A small team at Oracle built the original Oracle, and there were small teams at Informix, Ingress, Sybase, and IBM.

Twenty-five people can do a pretty full-blown system, and ship it, and support it, and get manuals written, and test it. (...)

Now the trick is to be where action is and to be part of such team :-)

created Sat July 12, 2003 5:43 PM EST [2003/7/12 17:43 EST] permalink

This blog is about:
XML, Java, and everything else (or nothing ..)

Find more about
blog author

Blogroll:
Sam Ruby
Russell Beattie
Diego Doval
Joel on Software
and some (almost) harmless entertainment: The BileBlog

Projects::
MicroLogger
Xydra
WSIF
XmlPull API
XPP3/MXP1
XSOAP
XMessages

RSS
0.92 [validate]
2.0 [validate]

Filter Entries:
Life
Java
XML
Computing
Web Services