ReadWriteWeb

"Many modern web sites need fast access to an amount of information so large that it cannot be efficiently stored on a single computer," Nick Kallen wrote on Twitter's blog. "A good way to deal with this problem is to 'shard' that information; that is, store it across multiple computers instead of on just one.

As an alternative to sharding, Twitter has developed a framework that can be used in lieu of either custom-building data-store systems or using untested open-source alternatives and is sharing the code with the public.

Today's startups, entrepreneurs and investors live and die by what seem like a series of holy proverbs. "Release early, release often" is perhaps one of the most poignant phrases when considering product launch and feature scope. On this cold Saturday, we're paying homage to the origins of the concept by recognizing one of the seminal works in programming philosophy, and looking at a recent startup that's taken it to heart.

Sending a piece of source code for troubleshooting to one of your friends or colleagues can be a hassle. Snipt.org provides a new solution for this. Just copy and paste your code into Snipt, tell it what programming language it is in, and Snipt will give you a short URL for your code snippet to hand out on Twitter. The developers want you to think of it as "twitpic, but for code and long text," though it is really a lot more flexible than that.

Digg for programming questions? Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror start letting users into their well built site.

The highly anticipated general release of StackOverflow, the social site for programming questions developed by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, hasn't happened yet - but the doors are cracked open and many new users are streaming in this morning.

Last month, we told you about Iceberg, an application that allows anyone to be a developer by simplifying programming into a process that can be done via easy-to-use DIY tools. More recently, another company called Cascada Mobile launched a platform that does the same for the mobile world. With their new platform, Cascada Breeze, anyone can program mobile apps. This makes us wonder - is democratizing programming the next big trend for the future of the web?

There was a time when only technically-savvy people knew how to create content and publish it to the internet, but the rise of easy-to-use blogging and CMS systems changed that. Today, everyone can be a publisher. Now, Iceberg wants to bring that same democratization to programming. In fact, that's their vision for Web 3.0 - the web where everyone is a programmer.

Every company is a tech company these days. From software startups to hedge funds to pharmaceutical giants to big media, they're all increasingly in the business of software. Quality code has become not only a necessity, but a competitive differentiator. And as companies compete around software, the people who can make it happen - software engineers - are becoming increasingly important. But how do you spot the 'cream of the crop' programmers? In this post we outline the top ten traits of a rockstar developer.

Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the "2038 bug," arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number.