Nov 23, 2011
Among the (small) community interested by the software practices of Lokad to develop entreprise software over Windows Azure, Lokad.Cloud vs Lokad.CQRS comes as a recurring question.
It’s a good question, and to be entirely honest, the case is not 100% solved even at Lokad.
One of the core difficulty to address this question is that Lokad.Cloud and Lokad.CQRS come:
from different backgrounds: Lokad.Cloud orginates from the hard-core data analytics back-end.
Oct 14, 2011
Developping machine learning software is special. I did already describe a bit how it feels to be in a machine learning company, but let’s be a bit more specific concerning the code itself.
One of most shocking aspect of machine learning code is that it tends to be full of super-short cryptic 1-letter or 2-letter variable names. This goes completely against the general naming conventions which emphasis readability over brievity. Yet, over the years, I have found that those compact names where best for mathematical / statistical / numerical algorithms.
Aug 3, 2011
Bitcoin is a fascinating concept, in short, it’s a crypto-currency backed by nothing other than raw processing power and geeky enthusiasm.
This currency seems to trigger a much positive reactions than skeptical ones. My personal stance is very inclined in favor of Bitcoin, and I have invested a conservative amount of Euros in exchange of Bitcoins. Granted, nothing that would too troublesome even considering a 100% loss of value for those Bitcoins.
Jul 4, 2011
My second (ever) guest post has been published today by Jason Cohen, founder at WP Engine: Why your company should have a single email address. This discussion is mostly based on our experience at Lokad, I will address of concerns expressed in both the comments on the original post and on the Hacker News discussion.
This is not an email problem, but a CRM problem. Very true. The secret ingredient to make single email work is, I believe, a CRM such as Relenta (or their next best alternative).
Jun 29, 2011
Yesterday for the 10th time or so, I have been sending a ticket to Squarespace the company hosting this very blog - support to improve their abysmal spam filter (inexistent actually) for blog comments. This is rather frustrating esperience to delete about 10 spam comments on a daily basis just because Squarespace can’t manage to do things right in this area. Worse, people have been quitting Squarespace for years for this very reason - spam comment being the No1 reason quoted for the change.
Jun 23, 2011
Wheels that big aren’t technically required.The power of the “wow” effect seems frequently under-estimated by analytical minds. Nearly a decade ago, I remember a time when analysts where predicting that the adoption color screens on mobile phones would take a while to take off as color was serving no practical purposes.
Indeed, color screens arrived several years before the widespread bundling of cameras within cell phones. Then, at present day, there are still close to zero mobile phone features that actually require a color screen to work in smooth condition.
Jun 8, 2011
My first guest post (ever) 3 Low-Competition Niches In Retail Software has been published by Andy Brice on his blog Successful Software. Special thanks to Andy and his wife for the tremendous polish, they have brought to my initial draft.
May 11, 2011
The latest Google App Engine 1.5 release announcement has some puzzling edges. For once, it seems that Google is making its public cloud evolves to become much more alike another public cloud, namely Windows Azure.
Google App Engine (GAE) was PAAS (Platform as a Service) right from the beginning, much like Windows Azure. Although, GAE had this very distinctive edge where apps were charged against strict CPU usage whereas most other public clouds charge per instance aka per allocated Virtual Machine.
Apr 5, 2011
Since the migration of Lokad toward Windows Azure about 18 months ago, we have been near exclusively relying on NoSQL - namely Blob Storage, Table Storage and Queue Storage. Similar cloud storage abstractions exist for all major cloud providers, you can think of them as NoSQL as a Service.
It took us a significant effort to redesign our apps around NoSQL. Indeed, cloud storage isn’t a new flavor of SQL, it’s a radically different paradigm and it required in-depth adjustment of the core architecture of our apps.
Jan 22, 2011
Returned a few days ago from NRF11. As expected, there were many companies advertising cloud computing, and yet, how disappointing when investigating the case a tiny bit further: it seems that about less than 10% of the companies advertising themselves as cloudy are actually leveraging the cloud.
For 2011, I am predicting there will be a lot of companies disappointed by cloud computing - now apparently widely used a pure marketing buzzword without technological substance to support the claims.
