lifehacks

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For the like-minded aficionados of the non-traditional: A Redis implementation of Twitter, designed for learning about non-relational datastores and Clojure’s creator Rich Hickey on state (bonus track: Jonas Boner on the same). Derek Sivers on the fatal determinism of declaring a goal or as I like to say, “the reason you find so many weblogs with one post promising to post a lot”. Michael Heilemann on the lack of good fiction in contemporary games.

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Shippin’ web apps ain’t easy. The Contrast guys lay it out. Garrett Dimon shows what goes into an iteration on Sifter. My experience with Dash matches what these folks are saying: building web apps is exciting, but a lot of the work is below the waterline, per se. A lot of work goes into support and infrastructure, but doesn’t manifest itself as new functionality.

Neat because you can: living frugally, JavaScript pixel art and hand-built microprocessors. Also, C as a functional language is nicer to think about than I’d first thought. If you ever get bored, check out the C output of the Glorious Glasgow Haskell Compiler it doesn’t even look like C. This makes my brain hurt even more.

Finally, for future reference: my mantra for the week was “cut the Gordian knot.”

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Rands In Repose: Saving Seconds:

This is the presentation I want to see at the next conference: in a room full of people, anyone is welcome to walk up to the mic and plug their laptop in to the projector. They’ll be asked to complete three simple tasks:

  1. Send a mail to a friend
  2. Find something on the Internet
  3. Save a bookmark or an image.

I would be fixated.

I’ve been independently wanting to do this for a while now. Clearly, Rands was telepathically borrowing ideas from my brain when I met him at SXSW this year :). I’ve been wanting to do something like this at a BarCamp for a while now. Personally, one of my favorite past-times at conferences is to shoulder surf other people. The idea above takes shoulder surfing, turns it around and formalizes it. I’d have a blast watching it, especially if you get a good mix of Windows/Linux/OS X people and GUI/terminal folks.

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