I get Facebook now!

Chris Sells wrote a post on Time for some anti-social networking. Like Chris I really didn't get facebook.

But I discovered the point of facebook.....

The point of face book is to get your friends to stroke your ego.

by sending you hugs, voting you sexy, cute, compatible, saying nice words about you, choosing you as a valentine, taking compatibility tests, by sending you gifts or aliens, etc etc blah blah blah. 

Facebook is a web app for people with low self esteem.  Which in hindsight is a pretty good market to target!

Boost

For anyone who does C++, you should also be well aware of boost.  In fact, you should generally be using boost  (unless there are technical limitations why you can't,  eg embedded platforms, non standard C++ compilers).

http://www.boost.org

boost is essentially a large template library that makes all kinds of general programming a lot easier.    It basically extends the std libray.   It is also the testing ground for the next C++ language standard.  

The following are worth their weight in gold :-

boost::shared_ptr

boost::bind

boost::function

and lambdas

Being a template library it also means you don't have to link to a library, you just have to include the headers and at compile time its generating all the code directly into your software.  So it's dead easy to get started with it.

I mention it because I interview a lot of C++ programmers who have never heard of it.   

Prefer Design over Platform Skills?

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/PreferDesignSkills.html

as he describes it I would disagree with him.

For starters we are dealing with a human being, so its never as simple as pigeon holing someone. But putting that aside

Secondly it is about building teams.

The combination of having broad platform skills in one person and broad design skills in another is a fantastic combo to get to work togeth

Thirdly, I think design skills are about as hard to acquire as good platform skills.

fourthly, good platform skills people are actually really good at getting into new platforms if that is what the project is going to be using. They often like to get into a lot more of the nitty gritty than a generalist

So,  the deciding factor for me would probablly what has each achieved, how complicated was it, and what kind of skills gaps do we have on the team.   I'd expect both to have a willingness to learn new things.