Chris Alexander

We all know how big and how quickly Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter and the like had to scale. To do so, they had to think outside the box, and make not only wide use, but also many upgrades and contributions to countless open source software projects.

It’s something we sadly something we hear very little about – corporate secrecy keeps much of the juicy details at bay – but these next generation services are not only using these projects, but also making significant contributions to open-source projects and even open sourcing entire chunks of their codebase.

I’d like to sit back for a minute, take a look at what these web powerhouses have been building, and appreciate their contributions to everyone’s development.

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I recently wrote about how students can make use of Team Foundation Server to improve management of their projects, include version control, and generate reports suitable for their assignments.

You may have also covered various development approaches in your courses at University – and you may have heard approaches like “waterfall”, “agile”, “scrum” and more being batted around – I did and I had no idea what they were on about. After a total of 2 years working in 2 startups (Huddle and TweetMeme) its all starting to make a lot more sense. But without that practical experience, I would have had no idea what these terms meant and what it was like to apply them.

Team Foundation Server is designed to be extensible to support various development profiles. As a result it is a great way to get started actually applying these principles, which will provide all kinds of advantages to you in your projects.

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Over the past few months I’ve been playing on and off with Skimlinks, a UK-based service providing easy monetisation of outbound links for websites. You may have also seen my post about how excellent their customer service is.

My desktop Huddle client, Clustr, wasn’t the only Adobe AIR application to launch last week. Skimlinks also announced the release of Skimkit, their tool for publishers to find relevant products for their website.

From the Skimkit website:

Filled with a live database of millions of products from Skimlinks merchants, SkimKit changes the way you research content; saving you time, and providing you with more targeted and relevant results, right to your desktop.

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Team Foundation Server is a product that Microsoft have been selling to work with Visual Studio for many years now. Over time it has evolved, and with the upcoming release of Visual Studio 2010, I thought now would be a great time to check out Team Foundation Server in more detail; specifically how it can help students get their projects done faster and better.

Team Foundation Server used to be the companion to Visual Studio Team System (which acted as the client). With VS 2010, Team System has been integrated into the core of Visual Studio. This provides two benefits – better support as it’s baked right in, and more students can get access to it for free!

There are 3 main targets of Team System:

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Today I logged on to Google.com for the first time in several days. I immediately noticed that the design of the homepage has had a bit of an overhaul.

I had a look, and it seems that very few accounts are getting the new design – I couldn’t find mention of it on Twitter or Google (even results within the past few days).

There seem to be more than a few changes in the homepage this time round. Here’s a quick run-down.

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