Over the years I've read a lot of research papers looking for better ways of doing things. Sometimes I find ideas I can use, but more often than not I come up empty. The problem is there are very few good papers. And by good I mean: can a reasonably intelligent person read a paper and turn it into something useful? 

Now, clearly I'm not an academic and clearly I'm no genius, I'm just an everyday programmer searching for leverage, and as a common specimen of the species I've often thought how much better our industry would be if we could simply move research from academia into production with some sort of self-conscious professionalism. Currently the process is horribly hit or miss. And this problem extends equally to companies with research divisions that often do very little to help front-line developers succeed. 

How many ideas break out of academia into industry in computer science? We have many brilliant examples: encryption, microprocessors, compression, transactions, distributed file systems, vector clocks, gossip protocols, MapReduce, search, algorithms, networking, communication, and on ad infinitum. For every Google that breaks out there must be thousands of other potential ideas that go nowhere, even in this hyper-VC aware age. 

We need to do is a better job of using the research. There's a lot out there in the literature that we could be making use of right now, but it's closed off from the people, i.e., developers, who can turn this research into gold. And it's largely closed off because researchers don't consider developers as an audience and they don't write their papers with the intention of being applied. Change the publication process and we can save the cheerleader and save the world.

I'm bringing this up now because: