Today's reddit meltdown did spawn some funny comments (like this), but did brought my attention to the fact (especially taking into account statements like this) – how much we do depend on the cloud provider? Is it fair to say, that the cloud is the new single point of failure?
I think – yes. The question is not AWS vs Azure vs Rackspace vs my own. The question is how I do balance the loss of one or more of these – yes, I'm speaking about cloud lock-in. So, take IoC to the next level – inject cloud specific implementations based on which cloud you run in. And on the how to manage this – who is watching the watchers? Let's take granted, that you trust the DNS (there is a reason why you need two servers in two subnets…), so it comes back to watching the capacity, the health of the cloud, the health of the other watchers, and the ability to switch quickly.
Is it easy to build such a thing? There are specific solutions for specific usecases, like GreenButton for MPI/Parallel/Map-Reduce cases, Dell Cloud Manager for managing VMs, but – and waiting for suggestions in the comments; do you know a good cloud agnostic solution?
Yes, one of the promise of .NET was that write once, run everywhere. Yes, Java has managed to actually pull this out. Than comes Xamarin. These guys (with Miguel Icaza, who I happen to know in person since 2001 probably – I still has his business card from that time :D) are just AMAZING. Write once as a portable library, and run as a windows store app, a wpf app, a web app, a windows phone app, an iphone app, an android app, a mac app – possibilities are just endless.
Posted the following links to 
Just recently did I (re)start doing interviews for the positions we have open (from java to C++ to Scala etc.), but I already started enjoying them. Whenever it's a junior position – a grad, an intern – or a lateral, senior position, usually after the first two minutes I can tell whether someone would fit to my group – it's not a particular question or topic. It's more the presence of a given glint in the eye that tells the candidate is a kind that likes to look under the hood, does not accept an answer without an explanation – e.g. she/he is someone that would fit the team. Recently I came across 
Let's take today's entry being pushed back due to snow – I was to write about interview experience, but an unexpected amount of shoveling just popped in…
By the same customer care specialist I was asked to come up with a short list on what I'd like to the project manager to know for me to be happy to outsource. Here is the short list:
Due to the amount of snow (an example on the right – this is the size of ice slabs I got from under the car) in the recent days I became another one of the remote workers; during which I started to think, whether the current setup of mine is actually suitable for longevitied remote working – and I can declare, it's far from being perfect, but can be made so reasonable quickly. Right now I'm using a Surface RT as my main device as part of a device evaluation, and its possibilities to get it connected to external keyboard, mouse, and display do fit my needs. So what are the missing points? One easy to miss is your seat – to let you ergonomically sit. Another one would be good internet connection – luckily I did not have any issues ever with my provider. Lastly, the comfortable noise level is something I need to invest into. Right now I'm using an old LifeChat device, which suits me most of the cases – save for when I'm doing phone calls. I'm now positively looking into investing into a physical IP phone with headset (hopefully either noise cancelling, wireless or both). What else you try to make your remote work life better? And yes, I'm familiar with the posts of probably one of the biggest 
As time evolves, patterns and frameworks also do evolve significantly. Some APIs, features tend to become less useful, less 'modern'. If you happen to work at an enterprise, these might be even put to an official list to avoid, even companies implement tools that either at checkin time or later on, automatically; or manually, using crucible or similar tool do hunt down these anti-APIs. Isn't there an easier way? More than a decade ago I've chosen the following as the title of my thesis: Enterprise Templates and Domain Specific Languages – Enabling Modification of Visual Studio.NET IDEs to Comply with Company Standards and to Enhance Developer Productivity (yes, title brevity wasn't an aim). So, what this was about? Visual Studio (and also Eclipse, IntelliJ, etc) easily allows creation of addons/plugins. One type of these addins is the ability to create a DSL – Domain Specific Language. In my thesis I showed a way with actual implementation on using DSL to recreate the normal development environment, language, base class libraries, etc. – minus those particular features you want to get rid of. You want to introduce a warning if someone uses UrlPathEncode? You want to get rid of the property EnableViewStateMac and default it to be true? All of these is easily possible with enterprise templates.