One of the most appealing aspects of the Agile movement is the breakdown of development efforts into themes, epics, and stories. I have long thought that the real problems in software development have less to do with algorithmic complexity and more to do with the difficulty of getting everyone on the same page. The theme-epic-story structure helps everyone see his place as part of a tale that has a beginning, middle, and end. We know how stories work.

All of this resonates powerfully with the work I did at Columbia in pursuit of my degree in English and comparative literature. Stories, I have come to believe, are how we make life make sense. Life is, in essence, a series of moments. The events that fill the moments have no intrinsic meaning. It is only our sense of story that gives each moment significance. This is, loosely speaking, the essence of existentialism.

Computers don’t have any sense of their existence as art of a story. To a computer running conventional software, facts have no meaning and events are not judged against values. A word-processing program spell-checks a ransom note as happily as a poem.

But what if computers comprehended the world, understood the relationships among the things whose verbal stand-ins they manipulate so fluently for us?

That’s the goal of NELL, the Never Ending Language Learning system at Carnegie Mellon University. Researchers have given NELL a rudimentary set of categories and verbal relationships, and turned it loose on the Internet. The system, which runs on supercomputers donated by Yahoo! with financial support from Google and DARPA, uses the Internet to check its hunches about relationships – what books an author has written, for instance, or whether a particular phrase refers to an item on a menu or a bill under congressional consideration. NELL’s learning isn’t supervised. The system constructs facts and relationships by assembling webs of information sources and evaluating their credibility. NELL scans and rescans millions of Internet pages and from the assembles a view of the world.

The results are impressive. NELL has composed more than 15 million beliefs about the world, structured as simple statements like playsInstrument(George_Harrison, guitar). Every day, NELL learns to read a bit more efficiently and accurately. It hones previous statements of belief and compiles new proposed beliefs. The researchers don’t see an end-point for the project. They intend to let NELL keep learning and learning indefinitely, and see what happens.

NELL doesn’t always get it right, of course. For a few days, before researchers stepped it, it believed Internet cookies were baked goods. The difference between “She bought the bread with the money” and “she bought the bread with the poppy seeds” still flummoxes Nell. For now.

If any of this sounds interesting, check out the NELL project page at Carnegie Mellon. You can download NELL’s knowledgebase if you want. You can even follow NELL on Twitter, where you’ll receive a continuing stream of the system’s new conclusions about how the world works.

Researchers say that NELL is an attempt to simulate the way human beings learn – cumulatively, gradually, with tentative assertions gradually becoming more certain. It’s true that NELL represents a new approach in that regard. But I don’t think NELL matches the human model. Human learning relies upon an extremely rich broadband stream of feedback. We learn that things fall to the ground by repeatedly dropping them and seeing it happen. NELL evaluates and weighs inputs, but it doesn’t seem to test assertions against reality. It’s unreasonable to think that NELL could perform such tests before its hardware includes robotic extensions. But until that day, I don’t think it’s fair to say that NELL’s belief-construction process mirrors human learning.

As for the differences between NELL’s beliefs, which are factual assertions that the system drops when they are disproved, and human beliefs, which members of our species cling to in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence – well, that’s a topic for another day.

Web recommendation: This story is both important and chilling. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. Reading about NELL made him itch to do some AI coding.

The best conference presentation I ever attended was at the Software Development Conference in 1989. I was editor of Computer Language magazine, the sponsor of the conference, and I had major responsibility for signing up speakers and assigning topics for the keynotes and technical sessions.

Larry Constantine spoke at our conferences, and Grady Booch. Bjarne Stroustrup and P.J. Plauger and Adele Goldberg. Bill Gates spoke several times. Ed Yourdon was a regular. Our conference attracted the industry’s best-known thinkers.

The session I’m talking about wasn’t delivered by one of software development’s legendary figures, but by a technical manager from The Whitewater Group, a small company that published an object-oriented programming language called Actor. Jim McCarthy had proposed a seminar on project management and slipped deadlines that he called “Slipping without Falling.”

Jim’s talk was both extremely entertaining and extraordinarily insightful. Drawing on his experiences in project and process management, he delivered a series of memorable, colorful aphorisms, each of which expressed in shorthand a profound truth about the messy process of shipping software. Jim focused on techniques for building healthy teams, a black art that is still almost universally mismanaged.

One of Jim’s most memorable bits of advice was this: “Beware of the guy in a room.” Many projects, he explained, have at their core a challenging bit of code that is assigned to the development team’s acknowledged superstar. This programmer takes custody of the crucial module and retreats to his office. The team spends the next weeks tiptoeing past his door so they don’t interrupt his intense focus. No one asks for forecasts, bug-tracking data, or progress reports. The team knows that its success hinges on this single programmer and his brilliance. His code will be ready when it’s ready.

This dynamic is common and pathological. It is anathema to teamwork. The pattern reinforces harmful stereotypes about the relative value of programmers and superprogrammers. It reduces meeting deadlines to a game of chance. As McCarthy said, “the results are uniformly fatal to the professional development organization.”

McCarthy’s observation hit home. I had seen organizations held hostage by a guy in a room. Worse, I recognized that on a few occasions, I had been the guy in a room. I had helped erode healthy teamwork in companies where I had taken sole custody of creative challenges and everyone else just waited for me to deliver.

Jim’s insights into team leadership led him to Microsoft, where he led the team that developed Visual C++ – a team that is legendary for its productivity and innovations. He expanded his Software Development Conference talk into a book called Dynamics of Software Development, which I commend to you as essential reading. Jim now runs The McCarthy Show, which offers leadership training. If you visit the Web site, which you should, be sure to check out the Episodes page, which currently offers 115 podcasts on elements of McCarthy’s leadership principles.

Curiously, Jim’s warning about the danger of “a guy in a room” is not unique in our industry’s literature. In 1971, Gerald Weinberg wrote an extraordinary book called The Psychology of Computer Programming. Like McCarthy, Weinberg focused on effective teams. His book included a short section called “The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming,” which listed rules for functional teams. Item number nine on the list was this: “Don't be ‘the guy in the room.’ Don't be the guy coding in the dark office emerging only to buy cola. The guy in the room is out of touch, out of sight, and out of control and has no place in an open, collaborative environment.”

I don’t know if Jim picked up the “guy in a room” concept from Weinberg or it occurred to him independently, and I don’t really care. It’s an important insight with wide applicability.

Does your team rely on the efforts of a guy in a room? Are you the guy?

Web recommendation: McCarthy’s still got it! You can catch a video of his Agile 2008 presentation, “11 Commitments for a Shared Vision,” by clicking here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He had such a nice day today.

Do you want to sit in that cubicle forever? Or do you cherish a secret dream of striking off on your own? Wouldn’t you like to start a small business and see if you have what it takes to make it grow? “Every normal man,” said H.L. Mencken, “must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin to slit throats.”

The problem with going rogue is that entrepreneurship is risky. We settle for lives as employees because we have too much at stake to roll the dice on a questionable business venture. Prudence is an understandable and appropriate response to decisions of magnitude. But we promise ourselves that if ever the right opportunity presents itself, we’ll make the leap.

I’m here to tell you that the opportunity is here. You want to start a business with an excellent chance of success and rapid growth in the U.S. and Western Europe? I’ve got the idea for you.

If you’ve been reading my posts here regularly, it’s possible you’ve already connected the dots:

• An operating system for cities
• Cyberwar’s first shots have been fired
• Smart infrastructure plus malware equals disaster
• Distributed intelligence means distributed security risks
• Insecure
• Security concerns top year-end news

Here’s the deal. Over the past decade, cities, counties, and states across America have augmented their electronically controlled water, gas, traffic-control, public-transport, and electrical systems with offsite command-and-control systems, wiring them up via Internet connections. Putting utilities online has improved efficiency and reduced costs, but it has exposed critical elements of the public infrastructure to malicious hackers.

Municipal systems have not been targets of cyber-attacks in the past, and they lack all but the most remedial security measures. If password protection is enabled, the systems are generally protected with the manufacturer’s default passwords. That’s how naïve local governments are about protecting their assets.

You want to be an entrepreneur? Here’s how you do it. Travel from city to city, analyzing vulnerabilities and installing protection. You don’t have to invent technology here. Tried-and-true secure lines, encryption, password protection, and firewalls will do much to make critical systems more secure. Help local governments organize and adopt attack-response measures.

Almost all utility systems are vulnerable, but cities have been slow to act. The need is urgent and the market is on the verge of exploding. Now is the right time to jump into this field.

You may find yourself more marketable if you acquire credentials. The Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) offers classes on infrastructure protection through the National Cyber Security Division’s Control Systems Security Program. US-CERT’s Cross-Sector Roadmap for Cybersecurity of Control Systems (PDF) contains some excellent background data that you will want to include in your business plan and your sales presentations.

If you’re serious about stepping out on your own one day, I think now’s the time to do it. This is an opportunity to achieve independence, make a bundle of money, and help the good guys defend themselves against attack. Why wait?

Web recommendation: In my most recent post I cited Edge, which describes itself as a collection of the world’s “most complex and sophisticated minds.” I’ve spent some more time with the site since then, and I must say I am not impressed. The articles suffer from grammatical errors, misused and inconsistent punctuation, dead links, and misspelled words. Don’t get me wrong, there’s some great stuff there. (And I dare say you’ll find the odd typo among my own online postings here and elsewhere.) It’s just, for a site that goes out of it way to proclaim itself the homepage of the world’s top intellectuals, edge.org has an embarrassing number of errors. The folks at Edge may be brilliant, but even geniuses need editors. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He’s dead serious about the entrepreneurial opportunity he outlines in this post.

I read an alarming guest editorial at the Wall Street Journal's Web site the other day. The article, “The U.N Threat to Internet Freedom,” was written by Robert M. McDowell, a commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.*

The article is quite a piece of work. McDowell believes the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU), under pressure from Russia and China, is poised to wrest control of the Internet away from existing technical advisory groups such as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and the Internet Society (ISOC). McDowell warns that the future of the Internet will no longer be in the hands of level-playing-field technologists, but under the control of national governments.

Among other things, McDowell predicts that the ITU is preparing to renegotiate a 1988 treaty and seize the power to, in his words:

• Allow foreign phone companies to charge fees for "international" Internet traffic, perhaps even on a "per-click" basis for certain Web destinations, with the goal of generating revenue for state-owned phone companies and government treasuries;

• Impose unprecedented economic regulations such as mandates for rates, terms and conditions for currently unregulated traffic-swapping agreements known as "peering";

• Establish for the first time ITU dominion over important functions of multi-stakeholder Internet governance entities such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the nonprofit entity that coordinates the .com and .org Web addresses of the world;

• Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work;

• Regulate international mobile roaming rates and practices.

It all sounds very dire. McDowell's article has sparked a ruckus at reddit, techdirt, and other technology-oriented online forums.

I agree with McDowell that a government takeover of Internet management would likely be disastrous. The Internet has grown and prospered largely because the technologists who administer it and plot its future are not beholden to national interests.

But I'm not going to ring the alarm bells just yet. As The Register points out, the ITU's publicly posted agenda doesn't include any of the issues that worry McDowell. The ITU lacks the resources to take over the Internet. An Internet takeover is contrary to the ITU's mission. And the ITU doesn't have the authority to execute the takeover McDowell fears.

Blogger Jerry Brito has additional doubts about McDowell's dire predictions:

Assuming every other country agrees to centralize control of the Internet, wouldn’t true control require the U.S. handing over the root to the UN? Why would we ever do that? And what does it mean to “Subsume under intergovernmental control many functions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet Society and other multi-stakeholder groups that establish the engineering and technical standards that allow the Internet to work”? These are volunteer-run non-profits. How can they be “subsumed” by the ITU? Why would they submit?

And even if they are subsumed, all the power they now employ is merely putting out technical recommendations. It is the voluntary adhesion to these recommendations by the thousands of networks that make up the Internet which make them powerful. How would you mandate compliance with new standards from a centralized global body? Would nations have to make it illegal to belong to a rebel IETF putting out recs to compete with the ITU? I’m having a hard time envisioning how you ”repeal and replace” such a large, distributed, and successful bottom-up process.

The ITU is meeting at the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Geneva this week. If they agree to formulate an Internet regulatory plan, as McDowell fears, the plan could pass into law at the ITU's 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications, slated for December in Dubai. The 1988 regulations governing the relationship between the UN and the Internet – the International Telecommunication Regulations – will be subject to renewal and renegotiation in Dubai.

A more comprehensive overview of what is at stake is available in The 2012 World Conference On International Telecommunications: Another Brewing Storm Over Potential UN Regulation Of The Internet, an article written by two attorneys at Washington-based law firm/lobbying enterprise Wiley Rein. I presume that the lawyers are speaking on behalf of an industry client. A history of Wiley Rein's lobbying efforts is available at OpenSecrets.org. It's not clear – to me, at least – who the firm's client might be in the current issue.

Is independent governance of the Internet really vulnerable to government takeover? I think it is. We've seen U.S. law-enforcement agencies take an increasingly aggressive stance regarding use of the Internet as a crime-detection and suspect-tracking tool (the news is full of more and more disturbing reports), and countries throughout the world are looking to censor or control the Internet for their own purposes. Governments are not doing enough to protect us from corporate interests and they are doing to much to morph the 'net into a tool for monitoring and controlling citizens.

Still, despite the real threats, I think McDowell is overreacting in this case. If other countries are (understandably) eager to reduce the U.S. government's control over the Internet, that may not be such a bad thing. The Internet is a global resource, and global participation in governance bodies is something to be desired, not feared.

Web recommendation: AT&T Bell Labs is rightly legendary in the programming world – indeed, in many technical fields. I enjoyed these observations about how and why Bell Labs was able to make such breakthroughs, an analysis by Jon Gertner of The New York Times. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He walks everywhere these days.

* The FCC is by law a five-commissioner body, but it's currently down to three members. President Obama has nominated a pair of attorneys, Jessica Rosenworcel and Ajit Pai, to fill the empty seats, but political wrangling is preventing their timely confirmation.

The ancient Greeks had no computers, but their mythology includes one figure who embodies an unchanging reality of programming. I am speaking, of course, of Tantalus. You may remember the story.

Tantalus was a king of Phrygia, in what we now call Turkey. He was a friend of the Greek gods until he offended them. Then he received a distinctive punishment. In the underworld, Tantalus was tied to a fruit tree that stood in a river. When he reached for a fruit, the branches would rise until the intended meal was just beyond his grasp. When he leaned down to get a drink, the water receded. Tantalus was sentenced to eternal hunger and thirst, and the objects of his longing were forever just out of reach.

So it is with programmers. But instead of fruit and water, we hunger for reusability.

You don't have to write code very long to realize that almost all of what we do has been done before. We are constantly solving problems that have been solved over and over again in the past. We write boilerplate code and reinstantiate well-known algorithms.

We would be more productive – and our days more enjoyable – if we weren't always reinventing the wheel. What if we could bundle code for reuse? Then we could incorporate algorithms and boilerplate code by reference instead of tediously rewriting it with each new app.

This dream has been the motivation behind many of the technologies that support our industry. Off the top of my head, the list includes these:

• Unix command-line utilities

• system libraries

• function libraries

• class libraries

• dynamic link libraries

• subroutines

• object-oriented programming

• package-oriented languages like Ada and Modula-2

• code generators and CASE tools

• component-based development

• visual programming

• use cases and design patterns

• application frameworks

• service-oriented architectures

It's a rare project that doesn't make use of several of these technologies. But the software we write can still be characterized as ad hoc. We continue to reinvent the wheel with each new project.

I don't have a solution to offer – the technologies on the list, plus, no doubt, others that escaped my attention – should be sufficient. The benefits of reuse are obvious. Yet software reuse remains maddeningly – tantalizingly – out of reach.

Web recommendation: Imitation is a form of reuse, I guess. And they say (do they still say?) it is the sincerest form of flattery. If so, the good folks at Apple must feel awfully flattered these days, due to this effect. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is grateful for the days Internet service, water delivery, and electricity are all uninterrupted.

I am writing on January 18, 2012 – SOPA Internet Blackout Day. Today, thousands of Web-site operators have temporarily deleted their pages to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation that is currently under consideration by Congress.

The protest seems to be superfluous. Over the past seven days President Obama has expressed opposition to the proposed bills, the bills' sponsors have removed the DNS-blocking provision that sparked the most concern, and a few former supporters in Congress have responded to Silicon Valley pressure by deleting their names from the list of sponsors.

SOPA and PIPA have been gutted. My prediction is that the bills will not pass. Even if they do, they will be rendered mostly harmless. It's Internet 1, Hollywood 0. Right?

Right...I guess. Sort of.

I've been as vocal a critic of the SOPA bills as anyone. I've warned of the bills' excesses here and here and here. My voice was part of an Internet-wide chorus seeking the legislation's defeat. I have had legitimate concerns about the power the bills would have placed in the hands of copyright holders and government, power to shut down or hamper the operations of Web sites without the burden of due process. I'm a libertarian at heart. I didn't have to think long or hard about my position.

Now that it appears we have won, I'm having second thoughts. If the bills are voted down (or, more likely, die without being put to a vote), the Internet will continue operating as it did before this brouhaha began. YouTube won't have to fear being shut down because a single person posted a video that included snatches of a copyrighted song being played in another room (to cite a persistent straw man from the anti-SOPA handbook). Everything will be hunky-dory.

And...piracy of copyrighted material will continue. It will no doubt continue to become more prevalent. Pirates will continue to become rich by offering access to stolen material. Google, DoubleClick, Clicksor, Pubmatic, AdBrite, Image Space Media, PayPal and other middlemen will get their share of the action. Content creators will continue to get nothing from illegal streaming and download of their work. They will continue to incur the expenses, do the work, create the content, and get nothing.

It isn't right to congratulate ourselves on killing SOPA and going on as if the world is as it should be. We own the Internet, and it is our job to make sure it is a force for good. We have a responsibility to correct inequities. To stop theft.

The Obama administration explained its opposition to SOPA and PIPA in a post at the White House blog. The post's authors wrote this: “[R]ather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right.”

So. What's right?

Web recommendation: Speaking of piracy, here's some food for thought. Click on the embedded video. Yes, it's a bit overlong...but it's a powerful, provocative message. It may just change your mind. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He is currently reading Markus Zusak's The Book Thief.

Conventional wisdom has it that we should pursue careers that allow us to spend our work-time doing what we love. It's common sense, right? Work is the biggest part of our lives, in terms of hours spent. We spend more waking hours on the job than with our families. So if we are happy and fulfilled at work, then we have taken a big step toward having happy and fulfilling lives.

This idea that work should be personally fulfilling is a modern notion. My grandfather loved books and opera, but spent his life doing bookkeeping and statistical calculations for insurance companies. Men of his generation understood that work was a sacrifice. They undertook the burden of having a career in order to provide for their families. The fulfillment came from having family lives.

My father didn't follow his bliss into a career either. As he told the story, he fell into his career as a result of being drafted. He was stationed in Okinawa, Japan during the Korean War. It was hot and muggy, and recruits were expected to march around all day wearing heavy packs. But my dad noticed that reporters for the base newspaper carried nothing heavier than a notepad. And their offices were air conditioned. So he volunteered for a position as a reporter. When his stint in the army was up he went to journalism school on the G.I. Bill, and that led to his career as a newspaper editor. I think he came to love the work, but that was just luck. He originally chose journalism as an alternative to real work.

Today, of course, we all feel entitled to fulfillment. Not just in our personal lives, but at work. Career counselors starting in high school tell us to figure out what we love doing, and to pursue careers that let us do it. The best life, we are told, comes from being paid to do what we would happily do for free.

I am not convinced. This advice strikes me as simplistic and even misleading.

My first job was in a doughnut shop. I was hired one summer as a temporary replacement for a “counter girl” who was on pregnancy leave. I poured coffee, served doughnuts, and made change when customers paid. I was a very serious amateur musician in those days, and I loved literature and philosophy. No career counselor would have advised a career in the doughnut biz to my teenaged self.

But you know what? I loved the job. I enjoyed the camaraderie with other employees. I took pride in keeping the counter clean and tidy. I got to know the regular customers, many of them professors from the local college, and made a point of having their orders waiting for them when they sat at their preferred spots. The better I anticipated their needs, the more I earned in tips. And at the end of every week I got a paycheck to spend as I liked. I really, really loved that job.

I couldn't have followed my bliss into that job in the doughnut shop, but it turns out that it was perfect for me at the time. I've had a lot of jobs since then, and I have loved almost all of them. But most of them came from luck, from happenstance, from coincidence.

If I had self-consciously set out to find a job that would make me happy, I would have been limited by my history of situations and jobs that had made me happy in the past. I would never have begun programming, and I would never have left programming for journalism. My willingness to pursue opportunities without knowing in advance that I would find fulfillment there has led me on a convoluted career path, but there is very little, looking back, that I would change.

So I don't accept “do what you love” as good career advice. It will certainly prevent you from learning more about what you love and what you don't. It limits your career options to extensions of jobs you have had and loved before. And I think it reverses the focus in a harmful way, discounting the power of attitude and minimizing personal accountability. My advice is this: Don't do what you love. Love what you do.

Web recommendation: This 2009 post from blogger Rob Diana – Why do you write code? – does a good job of listing the reasons developers find their careers fulfilling. (Hint: It has nothing to do with fancy workplaces or free soft drinks.) J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He lunched today on a pot of lentils, which always reminds him of Jacob and Esau.

As far as I am concerned, security concerns dominated the high-tech world in 2011. The past year has seen the first documented attacks on American utilities, a probably act of cyber-war against an Iranian nuclear-processing target, fearless (and effective) attacks by the hacker collective known as Anonymous, and the emergence of cellular phones as malware targets.

There is no reason to believe these concerns will be any less urgent in 2012.

As snow falls over much of the U.S. and partiers around the globe prepare to celebrate New Year's Eve, security stories continue to dominate the headlines.

• Under the headline “A cyber-remedy for poison,” the Economist took a break from its in-depth coverage of political and economic policy to bring its stodgy readers up-to-speed on the vulnerability of DNS servers to “poison” redirection. The Economist's article is basically a sales pitch for OpenDNS and its DNSCrypt privacy tool.
• Another general-interest news organization, the Huffington Post, has published a report about the vulnerability of train systems to DDoS attacks. “Hackers could shut down train lines with DDoS attack: expert” is an in-depth evaluation of the vulnerability of train control systems that are increasingly interconnected via the Internet. The report is a bit breathless, but it brings a serious vulnerability to the attention of HuffPo readers.
• Reuters has published a summary of research to be published by Karsten Nohl, head of Germany's Security Research Labs. “GSM phones vulnerable to hijack scams: researcher” is a preview of findings that Nohl will present at an upcoming hacking convention in Berlin. Nohn says virtually any of the world's billions of GSM phones could be subverted by hackers and instructed to send text messages or make calls to expensive premium services.
• Identity Finder LLC has released details of its analysis of the recent Anonymous attack on Strategic Forecasting Inc., commonly known as Stratfor. The summary shows that activist hackers raided Stratfor's servers and emerged with more than 50,000 unique credit-card numbers, 86,000 e-mail addresses, 27,000 phone numbers, 44,000 passwords, and more. Hackers behind the break-in claim to have downloaded 2.7 million e-mail messages. The hackers have already used stolen credit-card numbers to make donations to charity.

Best wishes for a happy – and secure – 2012.

Web recommendation: Hey, this is fun: Odd technology job interview questions revealed. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He thinks most cheesecake is too sweet – it ought to be creamy and rich, but not sweet. A thin layer of sour cream on top is a good sign.

I love late December. Temperatures plummet. The streets fill with Christmas shoppers. Snow falls. The blogosphere fills with year's-best lists and forecasts for next year. Year in, year out, some things never change.

In keeping with this longstanding tradition, and in conformance with the largely unwritten rules of blogging, I herewith offer my own instantiation of a longstanding year-end tradition. Yes, I'm going to recommend a New Year's resolution.

I won't advise you to lose weight, though statistically speaking, if you're American, you could probably stand to drop a few pounds. I won't suggest learning a new programming language or contributing to an open source project. Both of these will enhance your employability in these days of outsourcing and offshoring, but if you haven't started yet, my advice isn't likely to get you moving. I won't even recommend becoming more Agile, mostly because I still haven't figured out what the hell that means (and I don't entirely trust anyone who says he has).

No, my resolution – and it's one I suggest that you emulate – is much simpler. It's this: Learn something.

Higher learning is what separates human beings from the rest of the animal world. It's what transforms us from simple organisms that eat, respire, and reproduce, and into human beings capable of appreciating and creating things of lasting value. Learning is what allows us to participate in human culture, and the more we learn, the more deeply we can participate.

My New Year's resolution is to devote deliberate time to learning in 2012. You should do the same.

The time you spending keeping up-do-date on software development doesn't count. Learning a language or a framework or a new platform is all very well, but it's part of your career, not something you pursue to spend your life. I'm talking about nontechnical learning: world history, or learning to play an instrument, or auditing a literature course.

You can even do it for free, online. Here is a list of resources. It's amazing what you can find online. MIT, for example, makes materials from 2,000 of its courses available online, free, via its OpenCourseWare intitiative. The university is launching an e-learning framework and online certification program in the next few months. My alma mater, Columbia University, has more than 700 lectures available on YouTube, and Harvard has uploaded more than 500. It's easy to find educational material online, for free. And if you're willing to pay a bit, you can get certification. You can even earn a degree online if you're willing to invest some time.

So invest in your own humanity this year. Stretch yourself. Grow a little. And have a great year.

Web recommendation: I am sure you are already well-informed about the flaws in SOPA, the draconian anti-piracy bill that Hollywood is pushing through Congress. Big companies in music and motion pictures argue that the bill is necessary to prevent pirates from bankrupting them (despite the record profits they continue to bring in, year after year). In an ironic twist, the folks at YouHaveDownloaded.com are making available the results of their tracking of torrent downloads, and the results include downloads of copyrighted material from within Sony Pictures, Universal, Fox, the RIAA, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. YouHaveDownloaded even reports which movies and TV series were downloaded within those organizations. Embarrassing, no? J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. His favorite flavor of ice cream is vanilla, but he insists that this doesn't conclusively establish that he lacks information. He just likes vanilla, OK?