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Tag: research

A sign that the Portland tech community is growing… or maybe just has more questions than most

For a town that lives and dies on anecdotal evidence and innumerable and unvalidated “de facto” statuses, it’s always nice to see some quantitative metrics on what going on in Portland — and the Portland tech community. Apparently, we have questions. Because our Stack Overflow pageviews are providing a glimpse of the activity here.

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How burned out are tech folks? Pretty fried according to The State of Burnout in Tech 2022

We, as a global community, have been under a ton of pressure and stress over the past two years. Global pandemics have a way of doing that. But stress and burnout were issues in the workforce long before that. With the tech and startup communities doing more than their fair share of burning through talent. But most of that, while vaguely understood, has been largely anecdotal. Which is why I’m always happy to see efforts that attempt to quantify the effects. Like The State of Burnout in Tech report.

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Search industry titans converging in Portland for SIGIR Information Retrieval Research Conference

Although search is ubiquitous in this age of broadband Internet and mobile wireless devices, and search engine companies are among the most prominent icons of the Internet, there are still many challenges to overcome and new functionality to be developed for search systems. The field of information retrieval (IR) long predates the mainstreaming of search and developments such as the name of the leading search engine becoming a verb (i.e., “Googling”). This field has studied and evaluated the systems and algorithms that established the foundation for modern systems. Read More

Have you seen all the Oscar nominated films? Did you torrent them?

The Oscars are coming up. And while the biggest stories are always about who won what, there’s always a subplot—a techie subplot at that—that arises every year.

Academy members get to vote on the movies to determine who wins. But in order to see all of the movies, the Academy members have to get “screeners.” It’s like the Academy member’s own private Netflix of Oscar nominated films. But as with any distributed media, with distribution comes the potential for piracy. Read More