Leading today is a post by Valeria Maltoni on Conversation Agent. She really talks about asking the right questions, continuing to ask why. I have been known to annoy my coworkers with lots of questions about why code was written in a particular manner to solve a problem. For me it is more about understanding what the intent of the code is and whether it really solves the problem at hand. There are also several good articles about startups and process today. Johanna Rothman, Atlassian and Building Real Software talk about product owners, product managers and development managers. The NY Times presents a light piece on startups with a large number (<10) of angel investors, and Backchannel has an interesting read on the tech press and how they influence the narrative on various startups.

As always, enjoy today’s items, and please participate in the discussions on these sites.

Top Stories

• Is “Knowing” Obsolete? And Other Powerful Questions | Conversation Agent – Valeria Maltoni

Startups, Career and Process

• For Start-Ups, How Many Angels Is Too Many? | NY Times
• Three Tips for Product Owners | Johanna Rothman
• Don’t Blame Bad Software on Developers – Blame it on their Managers | Building Real Software
• A product manager’s guide to release planning | Atlassian Blogs
• Avoiding innovation errors through jobs-to-be-done analysis | Hutch Carpenter
• How the Tech Press Forces a Narrative on Companies it Covers | Backchannel

Design and Development

• On Green | Developsense Blog
• Compacting Garbage Collection in SpiderMonkey | Mozilla Hacks
• Hashing | Akash Sharma
• How I trained sheet reading using the web midi api | scalable minds
• Static Analysis in Clojure: Java Interoperability | Venantius
• Writing a download server. Part V: Throttle download speed | Java Code Geeks
• Smashing the heap by overflowing the stack | Geoffrey Thomas
• The Real Success Story of Microservices Architectures | Java Code Geeks

Concurrency, Performance and Scalability

• Scaling with Docker Swarm, Docker Compose and Consul (Part 4/4) – Scaling Individual Services | Java Code Geeks
• Handling 1 Million Requests per Minute with Go | Marcio Castilho
• Revving up JavaScript performance with TurboFan | Chromium Blog

AI, Machine Learning, Research and Advanced Algorithms

• The Netflix Prize and Production Machine Learning Systems: An Insider Look | Loren on the Art of MATLAB

Big Data, Visualization, SQL and NoSQL

• A more realistic perspective of country sizes | Flowing Data
• YC Alum PipelineDB Releases Open Source Streaming SQL Database | TechCrunch

Fun and Other stuff

• How We Built Our Blog | StackExchange
• How wooden puzzles can destroy dev teams | Khan Academy
• Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM | Linux Voice

Link Collections

• Dew Drop – July 7, 2015 (#2048) | Morning Dew