Stories by Peter Wayner

15 workplace barriers to better code

The product had to ship yesterday. The users are screaming about a missing feature. The boss's boss says we better get moving or else the ax will fall. Nothing ever seems to work as well as it could.

Benchmarking Amazon EC2: The wacky world of cloud performance

Before turning to the world of cloud computing, let's pause to remember the crazy days of the 1970s when the science of the assembly line wasn't well-understood and consumers discovered that each purchase was something of a gamble. This was perhaps most true at the car dealer, where the quality of new cars was so random that buyers began to demand to know the day a car rolled off the assembly line.

Review: 4 killer cloud IDEs

Surprisingly beefy, browser-based JSFiddle, Icenium, Cloud9, and Codenvy stretch from client-side JavaScript to server-side Java and Web stacks

Review: Amazon, the mother of all clouds

Ah, Amazon -- did Jeff Bezos choose that name to symbolize the largest bookstore in the world or did he realize that he would one day create an enterprise Cloud service that was as large and complex as the river basin? After spending some time with his enterprise infrastructure service, I think he saw this coming.

Safeguard your code: 17 security tips for developers

The scary stories from the Web are getting worse. First there were a few stolen credit card numbers. Then there were a few thousand. Now we hear about millions of financial records being exposed by security breaches, and we grow numb to the potential threat. Credit card numbers barely scratch the surface of what the bad guys are after, and there are more dangerous stories that come out of the labs studying cyber war.

Developer divide: 19 generations of computer programmers

If you're searching for a fountain of youth, the easiest way to get that feeling of continual rebirth is to hang around a few tech product launches. Every new rollout comes with the fresh, unabashed feeling that this has never been done before. Ever.

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