On the Storage Needed to Capture Human DNA

Ever since Watson and Crick solved the DNA puzzle, in 1953, shared a Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 with Wilkins, there has always been interest to store and retrieve DNA information.

However, it was not until the Human Genome Project concluded in 2003, that the entire human genome (of about 3 billion nucleotides) was considered fully decoded ¹.

SV-ALN Meetup: Be Agile. Scale Up. Stay Lean.

Dean Leffingwell

If you are already familiar with the concepts of Agile methodology at the team level, following Dean Leffingwell when he elaborates on the scalability of the Agile framework is a breeze. Such was my experience yesterday when he presented the Scaled Agile Framework™ (SAF) at the SVALN meetup.

The primary ambition of the Scaled Agile Framework is to take the Agile principles to be effective at the enterprise level.

We have already seen several approaches to utilizing hierarchy in using the Agile methodology at the team level. This framework takes the hierarchy, from a team or a project level, to program and portfolio levels, and recognizes the need for non-functional requirements (NFRs), in addition to the user stories that a user would definitely interact with, and recognizes business epics and architectural epics.

On Managing [Complexity in] Systems Development

Modern society invariably tends to need complex ¹ systems. (If a system is too 'simple', there may not be any market for it). Consider, for example, some of the successful products in present times:

1. Smartphones such as the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy
2. Tablets such as the iPad, Google Nexus 7
3. Electric cars such as the Tesla

Each one of the foregoing has, in addition to software, a collection of parts, in several levels of hierarchy, in creating the end user product. (A blog post makes an interesting observation that mature products tend to have not more than 4 levels of hierarchy in their bill of materials).

SVForum Meetup: Building a Cloud Platform for Real-Time Video: Learnings and Challenges

This meetup on Building a Cloud Platform for Real-Time Video: Learnings and Challenges was a very captivating presentation — except in the beginning, during introductory slides, when it was somewhat slow-moving¹ — on how BlueJeans have created a good recipe for videoconferencing service in the cloud.

Is Apple Safari for Windows the best browser for the desktop?

In a previous post, I explored the JavaScript compatibility, on my laptop, of the 5 browsers I regularly use against the ECMA's test suite. That was my first attempt at the comparison, and I didn't think much of it. I undertook that exercise again a month later, yesterday, and I can say with confidence the following:

1. Chrome, Firefox and IE fare reasonably along the same lines.
2. Opera shows a lot of holes in its implementation
3. Safari is the worst performer: crashes in the middle of the test execution, probably due to memory leak.

You can see all the detailed results in a separate web page.

The Power of CSS (at the Open Web Camp, 2011).

If you are a novice to CSS, you will like this presentation by Estelle Weyl, which I attended yesterday at the Open Web Camp, 2011. If, on the other hand, you know a little of CSS, you'll love this presentation!

In this presentation, you can learn how to produce nice animation effects, such as producing snow any time you want! This use of CSS, as opposed to an equivalent JavaScript code, shows the power of declarative programming, in comparison with its companion, procedural programming.