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Hi. I'm Adam Keys.
I'm a software developer from Austin, TX. I type lots of code, but also do improv comedy and write a bit. I'm a giant sucker for cuddly, fuzzy animals. I suck at continuous maths.
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Repositories
- Easy custom-defined templates for JSON generation of objects in Ruby.1 watcher / Pushed Jan 01, 12
- Presentation on Chronologic at Lone Star Ruby Conference V1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed Aug 13, 11
- Slowjam sings a sweet, sweet song to your slow queries2 forks / 6 watchers / Pushed May 17, 11
- Hey, you got your column-store in my key-value store.3 forks / 8 watchers / Pushed Feb 14, 11
- 1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed Sep 18, 10
- Provides a transparent interface for mapping symbolic representations to a column in the database of a more primitive type.4 forks / 17 watchers / Pushed Sep 12, 10
- Experiment Driven Development for Rails (adding Rails 3 support)2 forks / 4 watchers / Pushed Jul 08, 10
- All the code you need to get started, with an emphasis on dynamic languages.1 fork / 1 watcher / Pushed Feb 03, 10
- A lean, agnostic, flexible file-change watcher, using OS X FSEvents.1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed Nov 28, 09
- Where some would impose rules, we run headlong into the jaws of defeat1 fork / 1 watcher / Pushed Sep 10, 09
- A Rails plugin for connecting to and working with CouchDB via CouchRest1 fork / 1 watcher / Pushed Jul 22, 09
- Tries to match your Twitter friends on Delicious. Also, nobody beats the Biz!2 watchers / Pushed May 12, 09
- Example app for Episode 2 of Classy Web Development with Sinatra5 watchers / Pushed Jan 22, 09
- Example app for Episode 1 of Classy Web Development with Sinatra2 forks / 6 watchers / Pushed Jan 22, 09
- 1 watcher / Pushed Dec 22, 08
- Code and slides for a presentation on stealing ideas from Io, Erlang and Haskell2 watchers / Pushed Sep 24, 08
- Code and slides for my presentation first seen at RailsConf Europe 20083 watchers / Pushed Sep 09, 08
- Distributed and fault-tolerant realtime computation: stream processing, continuous computation, distributed RPC, and more145 forks / 2411 watchers / Pushed Jan 26, 12
- A Redis-backed indexing layer that can be used with any (or no) backend data storage.2 forks / 19 watchers / Pushed Jan 23, 12
- Framework to run tasks in separate processes.2 forks / 26 watchers / Pushed Jan 23, 12
- A Scala framework for building RESTful web services on top of Akka: lightweight, asynchronous, non-blocking, actor-based, testable22 forks / 317 watchers / Pushed Jan 22, 12
- An opinionated micro-framework for creating REST-like APIs in Ruby.89 forks / 1070 watchers / Pushed Jan 22, 12
- Classy web-development dressed in a DSL (official / canonical repo)374 forks / 3108 watchers / Pushed Jan 22, 12
- ZooKeeper client wrapper and rich ZooKeeper framework20 forks / 285 watchers / Pushed Jan 21, 12
- A framework for creating distributed datastores.61 forks / 1187 watchers / Pushed Jan 19, 12
- A Ruby client for the Cassandra distributed database.69 forks / 480 watchers / Pushed Jan 17, 12
- ActiveColumn is a data management framework for Cassandra. It includes data migrations similar to ActiveRecord, and a data mapping framework for "time line" modeled data.9 forks / 44 watchers / Pushed Jan 12, 12
- A script to easily create and destroy an Apache Cassandra cluster on localhost8 forks / 43 watchers / Pushed Jan 11, 12
- monitoring and metrics application ("Ping" in Chinese means duckweed)1 fork / 11 watchers / Pushed Jan 11, 12
- A community-driven Rails 3 style guide51 forks / 920 watchers / Pushed Jan 09, 12
- Resource-oriented architectures in Ruby. Roar focuses on object-oriented REST documents.17 forks / 268 watchers / Pushed Jan 08, 12
- Efficient, Immutable, Thread-Safe Collection classes for Ruby9 forks / 222 watchers / Pushed Jan 05, 12
- An alternate JavaScript and Ruby front-end and graph storage application for the Graphite Real-time graphing engine.16 forks / 318 watchers / Pushed Jan 04, 12
- cool.io is a high performance event library for Ruby built on top of libev16 forks / 607 watchers / Pushed Dec 29, 11
- Harness the power and elegance of Scala with nathanmarz's Storm real-time system3 forks / 56 watchers / Pushed Dec 26, 11
- Metrics for ruby - a Ruby implementation of metrics inspired by @coda's JVM metrics for those of us in Ruby land34 forks / 258 watchers / Pushed Dec 25, 11
- Extra Instrumentation for the New Relic RPM Gem66 forks / 160 watchers / Pushed Dec 22, 11
- A RubyGem that allows for checking standard styling of Ruby files.3 forks / 9 watchers / Pushed Dec 02, 11
- A StatsD client for Ruby apps. Provides metaprogramming methods to inject StatsD instrumentation into your code.5 forks / 73 watchers / Pushed Nov 11, 11
- Twitter's twin; a Rack middleware to expose a Twitter-like API from your app1 fork / 22 watchers / Pushed Nov 06, 11
- Ruby on Hadoop: Efficient, effective Hadoop streaming & bulk data processing. Write micro scripts for terabyte-scale data27 forks / 281 watchers / Pushed Nov 04, 11
- Basic emulation of awesome TextMate features for Emacs.49 forks / 308 watchers / Pushed Nov 01, 11
- Release your ruby gems with ease. (What a bold statement for such a tiny plugin ...)11 forks / 75 watchers / Pushed Oct 02, 11
- Presentation on Chronologic at Lone Star Ruby Conference V1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed Aug 13, 11
- Asbhe is a Ruby wrapper around the HBase java client library. It aims to make accessing HBase a more Ruby-esque experience.3 forks / 10 watchers / Pushed Jun 30, 11
- Efficiently order and track your group's shared lunches, vote on restaurants, and manage menu links4 forks / 13 watchers / Pushed Jun 22, 11
- A lean, agnostic, flexible file-change watcher, using OS X FSEvents.13 forks / 242 watchers / Pushed May 27, 11
- Slowjam sings a sweet, sweet song to your slow queries2 forks / 6 watchers / Pushed May 17, 11
- 2 forks / 12 watchers / Pushed Feb 15, 11
- Hey, you got your column-store in my key-value store.3 forks / 8 watchers / Pushed Feb 14, 11
- Write heredocs without worry of wonky indentation1 fork / 13 watchers / Pushed Jan 05, 11
- Rack middleware for rate-limiting incoming HTTP requests.32 forks / 265 watchers / Pushed Nov 24, 10
- an extraction of the Unicorn web server process monitoring code2 forks / 26 watchers / Pushed Oct 07, 10
- 1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed Sep 18, 10
- Provides a transparent interface for mapping symbolic representations to a column in the database of a more primitive type.4 forks / 17 watchers / Pushed Sep 12, 10
- Experiment Driven Development for Rails (adding Rails 3 support)2 forks / 4 watchers / Pushed Jul 08, 10
- All the code you need to get started, with an emphasis on dynamic languages.1 fork / 1 watcher / Pushed Feb 03, 10
- A lean, agnostic, flexible file-change watcher, using OS X FSEvents.1 fork / 2 watchers / Pushed Nov 28, 09
- Where some would impose rules, we run headlong into the jaws of defeat1 fork / 1 watcher / Pushed Sep 10, 09
- A Rails plugin for connecting to and working with CouchDB via CouchRest1 fork / 1 watcher / Pushed Jul 22, 09
- Tries to match your Twitter friends on Delicious. Also, nobody beats the Biz!2 watchers / Pushed May 12, 09
- Example app for Episode 2 of Classy Web Development with Sinatra5 watchers / Pushed Jan 22, 09
- Example app for Episode 1 of Classy Web Development with Sinatra2 forks / 6 watchers / Pushed Jan 22, 09
- 1 watcher / Pushed Dec 22, 08
- 4 watchers / Pushed Nov 07, 08
- Code and slides for a presentation on stealing ideas from Io, Erlang and Haskell2 watchers / Pushed Sep 24, 08
- Code and slides for my presentation first seen at RailsConf Europe 20083 watchers / Pushed Sep 09, 08
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Posts
- Jan 27, 12
Stick it to the man. Wake up early and do your best work, for yourself. Waking Up at 5am to Code:
At 5am I jump out of bed and code for two hours, then get ready for work. I do this every day, including weekends.
I’ve done this at various times. It’s a fantastic hack, especially if you’re a morning person. No one’s around to bug you, nothing else is in your head. It’s just you, your project, and the earlybirds.
I highly recommend it if you have the means.
- Jan 24, 12
Like all API design, putting a REST API on your app is tricky business that most people learn through lots of mistakes. So stand on the shoulders of other peoples mistakes! Thus, REST worst practices:
In the REST world, the resource is key, and it’s really tempting to simply look at a Django model and make a direct link between resources and models — one model, one resource. This fails, though, as soon as you need to provide any sort of aggregated resource, and it really fails with highly denormalized models. Think about a Superhero model: a single GET /heros/superman/ ought to return all his vital stats along with a list of related Power objects, a list of his related Friend objects, etc. So the data associated with a resource might actually come out of a bunch of models. Think select_related(), except arbitrary.
Mistaking the app’s internal model with what API users want to work with was the mistake I made on the first API I wrote.
Any big API is going to need to have dedicated servers that just serve API applications: the performance characteristics of large-scale APIs are so different from web apps in general that they almost always require separately-tuned servers.
This is how I prefer to roll my APIs lately. At the least, they should be a separate set of controllers. If you can extract a completely different application even better.
- Jan 20, 12
Rails is missing an abstraction when it comes to building REST APIs, in my opinion. Requests route through controllers, controllers call models or services to obtain the right objects. And then…you awkwardly try to bang a JSON object together with an ERB template? It gets awkward quickly.
There’s a lot of experimentation in the wild attempting to figure out what works well here. You can bang out a bunch of presenter classes. You can describe and compose representations. You can go resource oriented.
I came across one yesterday that immediately caught my eye. You could just use `lambda` to implement a bunch of functions that present, decorate, or map objects from one representation to another. To borrow an example:
# Define a base representation UrlsPresenter = lambda do { 'self' => "#{Gauges.api_url}/me", 'gauges' => "#{Gauges.api_url}/gauges", 'clients' => "#{Gauges.api_url}/clients", } end # Compose the base representation with more data UserPresenter = lambda do |user| { 'id' => user.id, 'email' => user.email, 'name' => user.name, 'urls' => UrlsPresenter.call } end # Pass an object to the presenter and convert it to JSON UserPresenter[user].to_jsonI love that this one adds no machinery and no state. Input, function, output. With just `lambda`, you can describe a bunch of transformations and string them together into meaningful and interesting pipelines. I'm experimenting with this now, hoping to find an interesting way that functional programming approaches can make it simpler to build APIs with Rails.
- Dec 30, 11
In response to Why metaprogram when you can program?, an astute reader asked for an example of when you would want to use
Class.newin Ruby. It’s a rarely needed method, but really fun when faced with a tasteful application. Herein, a couple ways I’ve used it and an example from the wild.Dead-simple doubles
In my opinion, the most “wholly legitimate” frequent application of
Class.newis in test code. It’s a great tool for creating test doubles, fakes, stubs, and mocks without the weight of pulling in a framework. To wit:TinyFake = Class.new do def slow_operation "SO FAST" end def critical_operation @critical = true end def critical_called? @critical end end tiny_fake = TinyFake.new tiny_fake.slow_operation tiny_fake.critical_operation tiny_fake.critical_called? == trueTinyFakefunctions as a fake and as a mock. We can call a dummy implementation ofslow_operationwithout worrying about the snappiness of our suite. We can verify that a method was called in the verification section of our test method. Normally you would only do one of these things at a time, but this shows how easy it is to roll your own doubles, fakes, stubs, or mocks.The thing I like about this approach over defining classes inside a test file or class is that it’s all scoped inside the method. We can assign the class to a local and keep the context for each test method small. This approach is also really great for testing mixins and parent classes; define a new class, add the desired functionality, and test to suit.
DSL internals
Rack and Resque are two examples of libraries that expose an API based largely on writing a class with a specific entry point. Rack middlewares are objects with a
callmethod that generates a response based on an environment hash and any other middlewares that are contained within the middleware. Resque expects the classes that work through enqueued jobs define aperformmethod.In practice, putting these methods in a class is the way to go. But, hypothetically, we are way too lazy to type
class/end, or perhaps we want to wrap a bunch of standard instrumentation and logging around a simple chunk of code. In that case, we can write ourself a little shortcut:module TinyDSL def self.performer(&block) c = Class.new c.class_eval { define_method(:perform, block) } c end end Thingy = TinyDSL.performer { |*args| p args } Thingy.new.perform("one", 2, :three)This little DSL gives us a shortcut for defining classes that implement whatever contract is expected of
performerobjects. From this humble beginning, we could mix in modules to add functionality around theperformer, or we could pass a parent class toClass.newto make the generated class inherit from another class.That leads us to the sort-of shortcoming of this particular application of
Class.new: if the unique function ofperformeris to wrap a class around a method (for instance, as part of an API exported by another library), why not just subclass or mixin that functionality in the client application? This is the question you have to ask yourself when usingClass.newin this way and decide if the metaprogramming is pulling its weight.How Class.new is used in Sinatra
Sinatra is a little language for writing web applications. The language specifies how HTTP requests are mapped to blocks of Ruby. Originally, you wrote your Sinatra applications like so:
get '/' { [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/plain"}, "Hello, world!"] }Right before Sinatra 1.0, the team added a cleaner way to to build and compose applications as Ruby classes. It looks the same, except it happens inside the scope of a class instead of the global scope:
class SomeApp < Sinatra::Base get '/' { [200, {"Content-Type" => "text/plain"}, "Hello, world!"] } endIt turns out that the former is implemented in terms of the latter. When you use the old, global-level DSL, it creates a new class via
Class.new(Sinatra::Base)and thenclass_evals a block into it to define the routes. Short, clever, effective: the best sort ofClass.new.So that’s how you might see
Class.newused in the wild. As with any metaprogramming or construct labeled “Advanced (!)”, the main thing to keep in mind, when you use it or when you set upon refactoring an existing usage, is whether it is pulling its conceptual weight. If there’s a simpler way to use it, do that instead.But sometimes a nail is, in fact, a nail.
- Dec 29, 11
The year is winding down, and its time to reflect on the 2011 that was. The year took me into the dark abyss of the American housing market and back out the other end. Somehow I ended up in Austin, a little lighter in the pocket-book to show for it. It saw the most exciting, and ultimate, year of that which was Gowalla. I got in pretty good shape, and then got into pretty mediocre shape. I read a lot, coded a lot, wrote a bit, and learned a lot about everything. ‘Twas a tough year, but all’s well that ends well, or so they say.
Things I read
The most interesting fiction I read this year was Neuromancer. This one was probably more jaw dropping before The Matrix came out, but it was still interesting. That said, it reads like the Cliffs Notes version of Neal Stephenson.
The best non-fiction I read was Godël’s Proof. It’s a short, clear explanation of his approach to computability. Even if you’re medicore at math and proofs, like myself, this one will stick.
The best technical book I consumed this year was Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns. First off, I love Kent Beck’s concise but powerful writing style. Second off, this book is like discovering that someone wrote down a really good theory of the elements of software decades ago and no one told you about them. Third, you should get a copy of this book, look for the used ones.
Things I made this year
I piled a lot of the things I learned about infrastructure and shipping software at Gowalla into Mixing a Persistence Cocktail. How to think about scaling, how to ship incrementally, overcoming THE FEAR. It’s all there.
I large chunk of my time at work on Chronologic. I presented on it too. Then I open sourced it. We deployed it at Gowalla and it held up, but not without some rough spots. I presented on those too.
I did a lot of open source tinkering this year. A lot of it is half-baked, but at least it’s out there. That was a major personal goal for the year, so I’m glad I at least stuck my neck out there, even if I’m not rolling in kudos. Yet!
Things I wrote this year
Modulo a summer lull, I ended up doing a good bit of writing this year. The crowd favorites were Why metaprogram when you can program?, The Current and Future Ruby Platform
Cassandra at Gowalla, and Your Frienemy, the ORM. My personal favorites were The ear is connected to the brain, Post-hoc career advice for twenty-something Adam, and How to listen to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.Of course, working at Gowalla this year was quite the ride. I wrote about that too, sometimes rather obliquely. Relentless shipping,
The pitfalls of growing a team, The guy doing the typing makes the call, Skip the hyperbole, Sleep is the best, and Don’t complain, make things better were all borne of things I learned over the course of the year.If I had to pithily summarize the year, I’d tie it together under change. Change is good, challenging, frustrating, and inevitable. Better to change than not, though!
- Dec 22, 11
The Year In 4 Charts: Planet Money does an excellent job collecting four economic charts (themselves chosen from three collections of best-of charts). I’m a dilettante as far as economics and economics go, but these charts do a great job of rolling up what seemed to have been the essential stories of the year.
A picture can nullify a thousand talking points, no?
- Dec 18, 11
After software development, music is probably the thing I know the most about. My brain is full of history, trivia, and a modest bit of practical knowledge on how to read notation and make music come out. That said, I haven’t really practiced music in several years. I’ve been busy nerding out on other things, and I’ve grown a bit lazy. Too lazy to find people to play with, too lazy for scales, too lazy to even tune a stringed instrument. Very, very lazy.
Long story short, I’ve been wanting to get back into music lately, but I want to learn something new. Something entirely mysterious to me. Given my recent fascination with hip-hop, I’m eager to try my hand at making the beats that form the musical basis of the form.
There are a lot of priors to cover (tinkering with various sequencers, drum machines, and synthesizers; steeping myself in sample culture; listening to the actual music and understanding its history), but I just made a short, mediocre little beat and put it on the internet. Herein, I reflect on making that little musical thing:
- I’m sure that, if I get serious about this, I’ll need real software like Ableton or Logic. But for my tinkering, it turns out GarageBand is sufficient. The included software instruments aren’t amazing or even idiomatic samples (no TR808, no “Apache” break included), but with a little bit of tinkering, they produce results.
- Laying a drum track down that is little more than a fancy click track helps to get started. GarageBand has a handy feature where you can define the a number of bars as a loop and then record multiple takes, review them, and discard the takes you don’t want.
- What an app lacks in samples you can make up in effects. Throwing a heavy dose of echo and a ridiculous helping of reverb made an otherwise pedestrian drum track way more interesting.
- I didn’t go into this with anything in my head that I wanted to make real. For the drum track, I ended up with a pretty typical beat. A little quantization made it end up sound better and more interesting than it really is. This process, manual input with some computer-assisted tweaking, produced way better results than the iOS drum machines I’ve used in the past.
- Tapping out the bass-line took a little more time than the drums. I didn’t have anything “standard” in my head, so I doodled a bit. This is where the “takes” gizmo in GarageBand came in really handy. Record a bunch of things, decide which one is most interesting, clean it up a little, throw an effect or two on it to make it more interesting, on to the next track.
- In retrospect, lots of effects is maybe a crutch. I don’t have enough taste yet to tell.
- With the drums and bass down, it’s time to adorn the track with a melody or interesting hit for effect. I added one subtle thing, but couldn’t think of anything I liked that was worth making prominent. If I were actually trying to use this beat for something, I’d keep digging. But for my first or second beat, it’s not a big deal.
I wanted to jot down my thoughts because I’d like to write more about making and understanding music, but also because I keep meaning to write down what I find challenging and interesting as I start from a “beginner’s mind” in some craft or skill. And so I did.
You’re six hundred words into this thing now, so I’ll reward you, if we could call it a reward, with “An Beat”.
- Dec 16, 11
Herein, some great technical writings from the past week or two.
Crafting your editor lightsaber
Vim: revisited, on how to approach Vim and build your very own config from first principles. My personal take on editor/shell configurations is that its way better to have someone else maintain them. Find something like Janus or oh-my-zsh, tweak the things it includes to work for you, and get back to doing what you do. That said, I’m increasingly tempted to craft my own config, if only to promote the fullness and shine of my neck beard.
Uptime all the systems
Making the Netflix API More Resilient lays out the system of circuit breakers, dashboards, and automatons Netflix uses to proactively maintain API reliability in the face of external failures. Great ideas anyone maintaining a service that needs to stay online.
List All of the Riak Keys, on the trickiness of
SELECT * FROM all_the_things-style queries in Riak, or any distributed database, really. The short story is that these kinds of queries are impractical and not something you can do in production. The longer story is that there are ways to work around it with clever use of indexes and data structures. Make sure you check out the Riak Handbook from the same author.A little bit of Clojure
Introducing Knockbox introduces a Clojure library for dealing with conflict resolution in data stored in distributed databases like Riak. If you’re working with any database that leaves you wondering what to do when two clients get in a race condition, these are the droids you’re looking for. I would have paid pretty good money to have known about this a few months ago.
Clojure’s Mini-languages is a great teaser on Clojure if, like me, you’ve tinkered with it before but are coming back to it. This is particularly useful if you’ve seen some Lisp or Scheme before, but are slightly confused by what’s going on with all the non-paren characters that appear in your typical Clojure program. Having taken a recent dive into the JVM ecosystem, I have to say there’s a lot to like in Clojure. If your brain understands static types but thinks better in dynamic types (mine does), give this a look.
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I occasionally post links with shorter comments, if you’d like a slightly more-frequent dose of what you just read.
- Dec 14, 11
I’ve said all this stuff before, but I came across some nice writing that highlights people doing it. I’m repeating it because it’s important stuff.
Step one, get on that grind. Making things is about consistently making progress. Consistently making progress is about showing up every day and moving the ball forward. Progress can take different forms, and sometimes won’t even feel like progress at all. The crux of the biscuit is to make the time to do the things that need doing in order to produce the thing you’re excited about making.
Questlove, band leader of The Roots and pretty much my favorite music nerd of all time, spends most of his waking hours thinking about, rehearsing, or performing his music. A typical day for him is 11 AM – 7 PM at 30 Rock rehearsing for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon or writing new music, 8 PM – 2 AM spent performing or DJing, and late nights winding down by studying their performance from that day’s show or doing some crate digging (cool kid speak for listening to obscure stuff in your record collection).
Step two, simplify. You just can’t devote the mental energy to awesome stuff if your brain is going in multiple directions. Close as many of the social medias, chats, emails, and alarm klaxons as possible. If you’re an organized person, clear your workspace; if you’re a clutter person, just roll with your clutter[1]. And, of course, think critically about what you’re consuming and using. If a tool, book, TV show, or application isn’t pulling its weight helping you do or think awesome things, show it the door.
Matt Gemmell on simplicity:
More importantly, I also believe in simplifying my life, offline and online, to let me focus on doing what I want to do – whether that’s writing code, writing words, or helping other people with their work. To do that, I have to reduce the ambient noise.
Step three, stop. Think. You can’t grind and simplify all the time. Your brain needs room to breathe. If you ever wondered why you do your best thinking and problem solving in your dreams or in the shower, I’ll tell you why: those places have no computers, TVs, or internet. Every week, you need to get away from your computers, music, and distractors. Go someplace novel and interesting; a coffeeshop, a park, a busy boulevard, a quiet trail, whatever makes your brain happy. Take a notebook or whatever you can physically think on. Now use that time to take apart what you’re working on, think about how it works, and figure out how to make it work better.
Jacob Gorban on thinking time:
In this state, we may become so reactive to the tasks that need to get done that we just don’t stop, take a step back and reflect on the whole situation. We may just forget to think deeply, strategically about the business and even about the work tasks themselves.
Your brain will thank you for the chance to stop and think. You’ll feel better when you remove the extra crap that’s distracting you. You’ll glow inside when you put the time in every day to make things and end up with something awesome.
[1] Sorry, I’m not a clutter person, I can’t help you here.
- Dec 12, 11
In software, this means that every piece of code and UI matters on its own, as it’s being crafted. Quality takes on more of a verb-like nature under this conception: to create quality is to care deeply about each bit of creation as it is added and to strive to improve one’s ability to translate that care into lasting skills and appreciable results.
When I wrote on “quality” a few months ago, I was thinking of it as an attribute one would use to describe the outer loop of a project. Do a bunch of work, locate areas that need more quality, but a few touches on those areas or note improvements for the next iteration, and ship it.
But what Brad is describing is putting quality into the inner loop. Work attains “the quality” as it is created, rather than as a secondary editing or review step. Little is done without considering its quality.
I’m extrapolating a bit from the letter of what Brad has written here, but that’s because I’ve been lucky enough to work with him. Indeed Brad’s work is of consistently high quality. Hopefully he’ll write more specifics about how quality code is created in the future (hint, Brad), and how much it relates to Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name”.
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Laughs
- Wherein I joke aroundWherein my hijinks are on the internet. Gulp.
Ruby meets Star Trek, a one-man skit
Rails MVC Public Service Announcements
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Posts
Solving real problems is hard. Changing real lives is hard. Making real people happy is hard.
The reason for this is simple: products are either date-driven or feature-driven. In other words, you’ll either sacrifice features to hit your date or you’ll let your date slip to ensure all features are launched.
A pretty tiny web framework in C. I doubt I’ll ever darken its door, but I like what’s going on here.
Yep, even though I switched from a first-gen Kindle to an iPad.
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Recent Tracks
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- Will Do (XXXchange Dancehall Mix) by TV On The Radio
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Info
- SummaryI specialize in having fun building software that is fun for other people to useSpecialties: Language lawyering, nasty problem identification, twinkie estimationExperience
- Jan 2012 - PresentDeveloper / LivingSocialI think a lot, and then type.
- Mar 2010 - Dec 2011Platform Dude, Infrastructurist, and Expert Typist at large / Gowalla IncorporatedDevelop and support 3rd party and mobile client APIs, improve application throughput and latency, upgraded Merb application to Rails 3, developed Cassandra-based applications including Chronologic.
- Nov 2009 - Mar 2010Expert Typist, at large / Independent
- Jan 2008 - Nov 2009Developer / FiveRuns* Worked on a variety of metrics collection, aggregation, and reporting applications implemented in Ruby on Rails
* Spoke out a number of conferences in a developer advocate role - Jan 2006 - Jan 2008Software Developer / PureDiscovery* Built web app front-end to semantic search and discovery technology
* Implemented a highly interactive web interface for customizing semantic queries
* Coordinated operational details of deploying web-based application - Apr 2004 - Dec 2005Software Developer / Tyler TechnologiesSoftware developer. Worked at all levels of a large architecture. Worked on core components, application frameworks, and built new application features.
- Jun 2003 - Apr 2004Web developer / RE TechnologiesWeb developer on apartment/MLS search and inventory application. Used PHP, JavaScript, Apache and Oracle on Linux.
- Jan 2000 - Mar 2003Software Developer (intern) / Texas Instruments* Built web management console for client-premise DSL equipment
* Added DHCP and HTTP functionality to DSP-embedded TCP/IP framework
* Wrote verification tests for the DMA controller of a pre-silicon DSP - May 1999 - Aug 1999Software developer (intern) / Brainfood* Added functionality to Flash training content
* Built web apps using Java and PostgreSQL
* Automated content processes using Perl
Education-
1998 - 2003Southern Methodist UniversityBachelor of Arts in Computer Science
