Simple is Beautiful

We receive a couple resumes (read : CVs ) once in a while ( that is : from once up to once+while...uhm, disregard that, sanity stabilization issues ) and most of the ones that get forwarded to me suffer from the same set of problems. I came across a very interesting blog post which describes the majority of those problems and provides a good set of reasons as to why such practices should be avoided. Highly recommended for job-seekers.

Slaying Mighty Dragons: Competitive Ranking and Matching Systems : Another great post by Jeff Atwood, this one dealing with attaching scores to the gaming skills of users ( ranking ), matching players of similar skills together and so on. I was reading about Microsoft's Xbox Live TrueSkill system the other day as a means to setup a system that pairs gamers of similar skill caliber together in the forthcoming update of Pathfinder Games service. Its interesting that the ELO rating system, although fundamentally simple, remains the dominant underlying gaming ranking system - given the fact its a relatively old 'invention'. Simple solutions usually last.

Why programmers don't like RDBMs : A good set of reason enumerated on this blog post. I don't have any arguments against the concept of relation databases, other that it leads to lazy programmers, the kind of developers who think an RDBMS is a system powered by magic that will store any kind of data, retrieve it in a matter of seconds and requires nothing more than executing a few SQL statements to get the job done. Then again, the same is true for all those high-level languages and systems that over-abstract operations. Win some, lose some.