João Prado Maia’s Weblog

This is a really cool presentation given by Naveen Viswanatha, a Sales Engineer at Google. It goes into a very detailed introduction of Google’s internal systems, and how they encourage communication and collaboration between employees.

I found it fascinating how evolved these internal systems are, and specially how the speaker never has to get out of his browser to do anything, be it edit a document, schedule a meeting, etc. You can find the original PDF of the presentation here.

We purchased a copy of this book a few months ago when it was still being written, so we got some “beta” copies of it in PDF format. It’s a very good book, with way more detail than what you can find in the Prototype documentation site.

Highly recommended.

I gave a presentation yesterday about using Selenium (IDE, RC, etc) for testing web applications, and I have uploaded the PPT to Slideshare. If you missed the meeting last night, you can read the presentation below.

• eleven2 – Local hosting company from Houston that sponsored last night’s meetup. Love their design!
• Interview with Paul Tuckfield, the MySQL DBA at Youtube, about his work there on managing their database infrastructure.
• Hack to allow you to run different versions of Safari on the same machine
• Keeping track of website uptime with Pingdom
• Google Chart API seems interesting, even though I would probably just use JpGraph for my own projects
• Love the overall layout and colors of this chart from the Wall Street Journal
• Krumo, an Open-source project that provides a replacement for the var_dump / print_r functions in PHP

I built a small web application specifically for the iPhone last year to search the availability of a book in bookstores. I think I came up with the idea for it when I was at a local Barnes & Noble store, couldn’t find what I was looking for, and wondered if another store close by had it in stock.

The application works by allowing the user to search for a nearby Barnes & Noble store based on a zip code, and also allows you to search the stock of those nearby bookstores for a book, given its ISBN.

Try it out now and let me know what you think.