Stuff I'm reading, March Madness edition

Big 12's gotta be cringing, half their teams are already gone?

But meanwhile, back in the office...

• Best of VLDB 2014

• Worship Maintainers

  We need to place a much higher value on maintenance and maintainers. We need to worship maintainers with the same fervor we worship creators. We need to recognize that not having emergencies can mean more despite being less visible than a well-handled emergency. We need to value continuity (in a bumpy world) as much as we value growth. We need to recognize that growth is pointless unless we provide it with a solid foundation.

• Pesticides and Bees: It's Complex

  It’s not that there are no smoking guns; there are hundreds of smoking guns, all of which contribute to the decline of bees. The consensus among bee scientists is that honey bee declines are the result of multiple factors, working independently or synergistically.

• A software engineer’s role traversal

  Q: Any final thoughts on the developer job market, or where you think it’s going?

  A: Jason Myers: I think the market is going to continue to be challenging for employers and great for developers. There are still tons of beginners around filling that need, and I’m hoping more companies will pick them up, and devote resources to leveling them up more. It’s still easy for mid to senior level engineers to move to other companies as they wish.

• Signals from the O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2015

  The old notion of a software architect being a non-coding, post-useful deep thinker is giving way to something far more interesting, says Neal Ford. “Architecture has become much more interesting now because it’s become more encompassing … it’s trying to solve real problems rather than play with abstractions.”

• The Dark Web's Top Drug Market, Evolution, Just Vanished

  Over the past weekend, the massive anonymous market known as Evolution halted withdrawals of bitcoin from its website, telling users that it was dealing with technical difficulties. Then on Tuesday evening, both its market and user forum went offline, with no opportunity for drug buyers and sellers to pull out the funds they had stored in their Evolution accounts. The result has been a wave of panic that’s shaken the online black market economy as much as any of the law enforcement drug busts of the last two years.

• Ungrateful

  Indeed, the very qualities that have defined Deadheads—a resistance to corporatization, a suspicion of institutions, a strong sense of ownership over the band—have conspired to make these particular fans among the most likely to be skeptical of an enterprise on the scale of Fare Thee Well. “The Dead are unique,” said Joel Makower, author of Woodstock: The Oral History. “The Dead encouraged bootlegs. They built a fan base around thwarting the Man.” But the Man is harder to avoid now than ever, noted Makower: “If Woodstock were to happen now, it would be ‘Chevy Presents Woodstock.’ ”