Adam Keys is Thinking

Things I learned in autocross this year

Use more gas and more brakes. Actually, just tap the brakes. It’s not a track, the speeds aren’t that high, the braking zones aren’t big. Oregon Raceway Park is a fantastic track. …

A weekend in Carmel, CA

My only goal was to spend the weekend by the pool. I did, and it was everything I’d dreamed it could be.

Within you are many wolves writing code

One wants to implement this feature to the best of your standards, regardless of the surrounding code. Another aims to fit in with the standards of the existing code, as it is. …

Notes from the agent coding (not quite) vanguard

Everything is weirder and more capable. Models are way better at many things, unattended coding in particular. But, to everyone’s dismay, that causes them to write in a tedious …

Interestingly

Three modalities of creativity I am keen to explore: dirt, screenshots, monk-like. 1. Dirt, metaphorically Take something worthless (e.g., literal dirt, metaphorically non-working …

The local maxima we need to reach the next global maximum

Half-way through 2026, I’m finally getting around to posting some predictions for the year. Really, ideas about how software development can fix the house to deal with coding …

RIP my vim muscle memory

I bet a lot of the grumbling about coding agents is really about losing out on the joy of moving quickly through code via a deeply learned text editor. I’m feeling it too, but I’m …

Blogging (Classic)

Wherein you need feeds, notes, and documents.

This is not my beautiful agent-driven economy

Wherein someone’s gonna be wrong about AI

Processes should serve outcomes, not the other way ‘round

In moments where process overwhelms a team’s ability to get stuff done, I’ve been fond of saying we’re not here to: Push Trello cards around. Guess if a coding task is more like a …

Bobcat, a document editor prototype

Wherein I’ve been making my own little text editors. Sometimes, even cozy ones.

It’s the end-game of typing code as we know it

Wherein it continues to be about the other things

Joining a new crew amidst a sea change

Wherein types, agents, and quality-of-life matter a lot for software development these days.

The hand we dealt

Wherein generational life-scripts have downstream consequences.

Three great clarinet-adjacent sentences

I DID NOT KNOW what was going to come from Angela’s clarinet. No one could have imagined what was going to come from there. I expected something pathological, but I did not expect …

Coding for the sake of typing in code

Expert typist’s elegy

Owl visitor

Wherein a bird friend is spotted from our back yard

The whole product team can use coding agents

I did a talk on coding agents, like Claude Code and Codex, advocating that everyone on product teams, not just coders, can use them to do more or better work.

We live in a time when the math favors iteration

Granted, quality of idea matters. The worst idea executed swiftly and repeatedly is still probably the worst idea. But it’s hard to know, with ideas, when you’ve got a winner or …

Easier doesn’t mean less good

Explosion of mediocrity, video gaming edition: it’s become easier to build games, so there are more and more games every year; but the number of highly acclaimed games per year has …

CSS done grown up

Look at this bit of CSS. For greatest effect, imagine sending it yourself from ten or fifteen years ago, or the first time you hit upon a limitation in browser compatibility or …

Feel, fast, function, form

In that order, every time. I make a big deal about working downhill. Get stuff done, slice it smaller, get feedback, go again, remove friction, a little faster this time. But let …

No surprises

When leading projects, in any capacity, avoid startling your colleagues. Tech leads, engineering managers, product managers, etc. need to keep peers and stakeholders informed. When …

Dig out, not up

So you messed up. Now what? Late projects stay late. It’s terrifically rare to “catch up” on a late project. When projects run late, it’s because you’ve missed something in your …

Finishing is a mindset

The last 10% of any creative act is the hard part. (Previously: Finishing is a skill.) You had an idea, thought it would take X days, only to find X-1 days of all these other …

Good enough to get going

The winning scenario for agent-assisted code, design, science, etc. is humans having more time to do creative and impactful thinking because computers/LLMs do the tedious setup, …

Multitasking with my eccentric pal

Over the course of two experiments within two half-day coding sessions, I better glimpsed what working with coding agents might look like over the next couple of years. 1. I teach …

Prototyping with LLMs

A few reflections on what I’ve been building (with) lately: llm is great for prototyping many kinds of workflows. If you’re thinking “I’d like to build an app with some …

We tested for tedium

Folks are ruffled that LLMs, even without tool use, are pretty good at coding interview challenges. How will we even know who is good at coding anymore? (Current hypothesis: by …

Exit Codes Are Having a Moment

LLMs (and agent coding tools in particular) love a fitness function. Give them a tool that indicates success or failure and they’ll go to town. Compiler errors, linter …

So your estimates were wrong

AKA “Help! I estimated a project and hit every branch falling down the surprises tree.” A shocking turn of events that definitely has never happened to any of us. Don’t worry too …

Maintain fewer and smaller backlogs

Easy advice to give, tricky to implement. Sometimes it’s effective, sometimes it’s a wash. Like rearranging for the sake of rearranging. But when it is effective, it creates mental …

A parable of adventures

Consider two adventurers, one setting off alone and another setting off with fellow explorers. Both in search of greater glory through software development. 🙃 One adventurer closes …

A field guide to exploring rabbit holes

You’re deep in eldritch code, a product problem, or a cross-functional issue that is affecting your team. Hours have passed, and you feel like you’re only starting to get your …

🔊Recently listening, mostly jazz

“Puzzling Evidence”, The Talking Heads. Somehow I’ve just noticed this song. It sounds like if the E-Street Band helped write a Talking Heads song. Which is not a thing I would …

Make great stuff. Tell people about it.

Don’t sweat the network or medium. It’s all tinkering at the margins! Serving at the pleasure of the algorithm! The core concern, the thing that really matters, is doing …

Six easy pieces on Shape Up

In short: like any method of working that is copied from one organization and pasted into another, very different organization, there are chutes and ladders. Habits and practices …

📺 Recently on television

What We Do in the Shadows, final season + finale: they did a fantastic job on the finale. The last season had a few stand-out episodes; it doesn’t feel like the show went one …

Workplace Groundhog Day loops

There are many ways to feel like you’re living out the same workday over and over. Weekly, if you’re unlucky. Let’s talk about two in particular: failure to write it down, and …

Reading well in late 2024

It was a good year of reading, for me. I read some big books. I got more insight out of the books I read. Furthermore, I read things I don’t normally read, like philosophy and …

A low-road LLM prototype, with FastHTML

I wanted to tinker with llm and “AI engineer” up a humble tool for working with my notes, writings, highlights, etc. Emphasis on humble: if I could tinker with any one of those …

Backlogs

Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em🤷‍♂️ A product team (at least the ones that have been working for more than three weeks) has a backlog of work they’d love to tackle, but …

Managers and coding: “it depends”, but go for it anyway

🌶️ Hot-take: if you’re a manager and find you1 miss building…then build2! On your time: mornings, weekends, national holidays. Whatever you want: tools for yourself, something …

Granted, House Atreides did miss some milestones

A couple of lessons on leadership in ​Herbert’s Dune​: “Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him…once…long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must …

Lists for the past, lists for the future

Reader, I want to (once again) talk to you about the life-changing power of making a list and putting it in order. Ambiguity of like, “what are we gonna build?” or “how are we …

Team sizes & breakpoints

“Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each …

Kinda comedy

Permit me to throw shade at the Emmy Awards for a moment. Reservation Dogs is a better kinda-comedy than The Bear. Dogs is consistently funny and finds ways to explore the lives, …

The emotion key

The function key, on iOS and possibly Mac keyboards, is bound1 to show the emoji picker. Apple has chosen to bind a whole key, no modifiers or anything, to “convey an emotion”. A …

Warm up your network before things get spooky

As I write this, it’s late-2024 and the job market is tough for jobseekers. If one finds a job within three months, they’re considered lucky. Some folks go 2–3 times longer …

Bias towards hitting publish

Jeff Triplett, Please publish and share more: You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try …

Iteration (take 7)

Kent beck, Coupling and Cohesion: The only way to be able to describe something well is to describe it badly 100 times. I’m forever feeling this one. Many times, I’ve felt the idea …

Scaling down native dev

In short: I want to build low-road applications for myself. They will have a very narrow function. I may use them for as little as a week or so, finish the task at hand, and move …

A bag of vignettes

From that point on, well, there’s only one, maybe two great nail salons in Amsterdam. I was rewatching Ocean’s Twelve, because empty calories and fantastic faces. Having watched it …

Throw more books

Simon Sarris, Reading Well: You should start many books and complete few. You should never feel beholden to completing them, there are simply too many worthwhile works to read. I’m …

Hot-takes on web browsers

Safari is (on macOS) the only good application and web browser. Chrome is a remarkable feat of engineering but a mediocre application. Arc is extremely promising. Reimagining the …

Six one-liners on meetings

Make a better meeting when you can, and the best of a meeting when you can’t. The choice to avoid holding a meeting may snowball into problems that require even more meetings. …

Pen, paper, and a problem

Ben Brooks, Thinking Analog: The way this works is simple: use a notebook and a pen when you need to work through a problem of any kind. Not a tablet with a stylus. Not a …

Every day counts (even edits)

George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: “What does an artist do, mostly? She tweaks that which she’s already done. There are those moments when we sit before a blank page, …

Jam session

At its best, social media is like jazz — there’s an improvisational, multi-player quality to it. Following threads, riffing, and quipping creates a collaborative rhythm all its …

All roads lead me to maximalism

Within me are two musical opinions, constantly at tension. 😇 “You can make pretty dang good music with only a few, excellent musicians. Sometimes, even pretty dang good and loud …

Lukewarm water on a hot day

Henrik Karlsson, Swimming in July: There is something so frivolous about water. It makes you float like you are in outer space! And no matter what you do—whatever shape you make of …

Mind the attention traps

Alan Jacobs, The Homebound Symphony: Station Eleven had the Traveling Symphony: I’m trying to be the Homebound Symphony. Just one person sitting in my study with a computer on my …

Jazz as cinematic universe

I love when jazz album covers list all the players. Herbie Hancock! Your favorite drummer. A couple of sax players you think are pretty good. A bassist you’ve never heard of! It’s …

Wherein this old dog learns new tricks

I’m dabbling in building, again. I felt the energy of XOXO for nostalgia of a web of the past, making one’s own thing, and indulging in (socially good) weird whilst doing it. It’s …

On Founder Mode

Founder Mode. The discourse (algorithm) demands we discuss it. My hot-take: the original article is, honestly, not PG’s best work and is best viewed as a jargon land-grab. That …

How I write on the web, in 2024

My approach to writing on the web in 2024: Write (to think, riff, share, or publish) every day. Post anything over about one hundred words to my blog. Don’t worry about scheduling, …

Less waste, equal haste

If you waste less time, you’ll make more stuff without increasing time outlays. Find more leverage, you’ll make more stuff in the same amount of time Get better & faster at a task, …

Letterbird, lovely

Recently, I found myself in need of a contact form for my website. Luckily, I didn’t let myself fall to the temptation of rolling my own! 🙃 My good enough pals at Good Enough have …

Decision and context flows

Commonly shared/held wisdom: leadership is flowing decisions down and information up. What if this is (slightly) untrue? Or at least, in need of contextualizing. Strategy, …

Associated objects are promising

Garrett Dimon, Organizing Rails Code with ActiveRecord Associated Objects: At the simplest level, associated objects come in handy mostly by helping organize and compartmentalize …

Write a lot

Nat Bennett, How to write: Write a lot Just Write Read a lot Write every day Walk Have a time and a place for writing Take it less seriously Have an audience At least as good as …

This is not my beautiful role

Ben Kuhn, Categories of leadership on technical teams: More importantly, though, we often want to somehow split these responsibilities between people. Team leadership covers a huge …

Methods of production

Herein, a napkin sketch on producing creative work, ideas on finding the spark(s) that consistently lead us to assemble new things, and the hand-wavy stuff in-between. Production …

Top of Mind No. 7

It’s been so long since we spoke, /now-page aficionados. I’ve been moving to Portland, buying a house therein, and selling a house in a bizarre hyperlocal real estate situation. …

Hurry up and whiff it

There are things you can only learn by negative experience. In these cases, you just gotta go out there and suffer: Lose your first 50 games as soon as possible (Go proverb) …

The (Leadership) Discipline

Robert Fripp via Austin Kleon, The Meaning of Discipline: The musician has three instruments: the hands, the head, and the heart, and each has its own discipline. So, the musician …

diff, a top-5 software tool

Mike Hoye, Fifty Years of Diff: My friend Greg Wilson has argued, and I absolutely believe, that you can divide the entire computational universe into who has diff and patch, and …

Journal, highlight, revisit, blog

Writing from notes is a bootstrapping problem. Anything you can do to get started, overcome static friction, and “defeat” the first blank canvas is the best thing you can do. I …

Slash pages & micro-features

Slash pages: …are common pages you can add to your website, usually with a standard, root-level slug like /now, /about, or /uses. They tend to describe the individual behind the …

Constraints generate style

Steph Ango, Style is consistent constraint: “Collect constraints you enjoy. Unusual constraints make things more fun. You can always change them later. This is your style, after …

I switched notes apps (and back) (again) (and here’s what I learned)

Yet again, the grass was not greener. I did learn a little more of simplicity-by-reduction. I asked myself, what Obsidian plugins or idioms am I using because someone else seemed …

Corporate stories

Should internal narratives, and the philosophies they generate, be among the guarded proprietary info within a company1? The stories the company tells the outside world are more …

Be findable

Thorsten Ball with a great reference to Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Be findable: You’re in your apartment watching TV, and they knock on the door, like “Jerry, I’m Dave …

Seek the good (enough) things

100 Tips for a Better Life: Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as …

Finishing is the skill

Previously: The only way to finish writing, planning, coding, designing, etc. is to do the thing. Rarely will new tools, larger scope, a different approach, another section, more …

Frequency instead of quantity

Austin Kleon, A few notes on daily blogging: With blogging, I’m not so sure it’s about quantity as much as it’s about frequency: for me, there’s something kind of magical about …

Everyone wins: document whatever resists simplification

The traditional prescription for keeping software easy to work with and amenable to change is “refactoring”. As we’re fixing bugs, adding features, and making new possibilities, we …

Pastoral and modern approaches to attention

Alan Jacobs, the attention cottage (Via Austin Kleon). I was not expecting to quote an attention metaphor involving the cardiovascular system and cottages, and yet: To care only …

Delegate, don’t dictate

It’s the only way to survive as an engineering leader. Hand off tasks/work to the team Give guidelines, execution tactics, or constraints to keep things on track Set an expectation …

Beginners helping experts

“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” — Shunryo Suzuki The trick being, how can an expert help a beginner, given they know …

Humble writing

I’m trying to change up my blogging style: write without telling people what to do. Show, don’t tell. It’s a stronger writing position to take. It’s the difference between writing …

Try smarter, not harder

“Try harder” is the worst kind of plan. It’s basically not a plan, a small resistance to planning. An anti-plan that signals virtue but instead reflects shallow thinking. Don’t say …

The leisure/disconnection/creation circuit

Two prolific, internet-known travelers: Craig Mod: writer, walker, photographer, software-adjacent Brock Keen: photographer, car camper, road-tripper, Porsche-enthusiast These …

Show up every-dang day

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, 4 science-backed ways to build your own mental gym: Building mental strength is not too different from building physical strength. It’s all about consistency. …

Personal websites are corner stores and neighborhood garages

Is a personal blog or general-purpose more like a small shop or your local garage? They’re a bit of a calm business. A corner store with a friendly owner/operator. Never grows …

A big bucket of text

Matt Stein, How I Use Obsidian: It’s also just a heap of Markdown I’ve carried around and put Obsidian in charge of sometime late in 2021. Those plain text files are mine and they …

Recently in pair programming with AI

My recent experience with GitHub Copilot Chat (non-autocomplete assistance) and Raycast’s ChatGPT-3.5 integrations lead me to think that prompting will be a crucial skill for most …

Juniors/seniors and incremental/vision development

The ability to focus on one concern at a time is the mark of a senior developer. It takes experience to ignore other factors as noise. It takes time to learn how to avoid tripping …

Trim the attention sails

In America, the 2024 election cycle is unlikely to amuse anyone. Maybe this is a rallying point for “unifying” the country: a near-universal loathing of our politicians, how they …

Blogs were/are a fun moment

Manuel Moreale, Why I write: But the reason why I started is long gone at this point. I started the blog as some sort of public accountability tool and it’s now everything but …

Avoid the ternary operator, I’m begging you

Allow me a bit of a soapbox-rant. A spicy take, as we might say these days. You’re using the ternary operator wrong in Ruby, JavaScript, and almost everything else. It’s for …

Psuedoprose

Taylor Troesh’s pseudoprose is a notation for writing/note-taking/thinking: How to Write in English, Spanish, whatever. Grammar is optional. Markdown is encouraged. Embed in any …

Rails generators are underrated

Every experienced Rails developer should pick up Garrett Dimon’s Frictionless Generators. Generators are an often overlooked piece of the Rails puzzle. The book shines a light on …

Collective flow

Dave Rupert, Play at work: I’ve talked about this before in the context of prototyping and play and how we worked at Paravel. It’s a lot like playing baseball; each member of the …

“Yes, and” despite pessimistic engineering intuitions

As engineers, we often face the consequences of shallow ideas embraced exuberantly. Despite those experiences, we should try to solve future problems instead of re-litigating …

You learn faster by falling down

Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: The “self-belief” model of motivation assumes that if you acknowledge the possibility of failure, then you’ll be too demoralized or afraid to take …

Building software is great

…even if some days working in corporations or under unwanted pressure makes it considerably less fun. I also just don’t especially want to stop thinking about code. I don’t want to …

Use fewer algorithmic feeds, mostly search-based

Rob Walker via Austin Kleon, More search, less feed: I’ve been thinking a lot about the search box versus the feed,” he said. “Let’s take Twitter. When I open it, everybody wants …

Shell history is more valuable than shell customization

Thorsten Ball, Which command did you run 1731 days ago?: Recipe for living a good life in the shell: Make sure it’s fast. Make sure its history can grow nearly infinitely and you …

Masters of the space between notes

Virtuosity and speed are nice, in music and life. But you leave some space between the notes or slow things way down? Make some space in between the music for the music to happen? …

Careers are non-linear

David Hoang, Should managers be technical?: Career development looks more like unlocking attributes for a different subclass in a role-playing game, than picking a distinct class …

A tinker for your tinkers

David Crawshaw, jsonfile: a quick hack for tinkering. 114 lines, including comments. Nothing revolutionary here. Just a nicely written and well-thought-out “classic hack” for …

I love a good shower-thought

Regarding Leó Szilárd, a theoretical physicist who first conceived of the possibilities of nuclear chain reactions, nuclear power, and nuclear weapons: The bath was down the hall. …

Sneaker-net’ing URLs to personal devices in the year 2024

Suppose you’re on a computer provisioned by a corporate IT department. They’ve restricted the software you can install. On principle, you’ve decided that even signing in to …

Squeezing ideas

Turning a big idea into a more manageable one has second-order consequences: Remember, the more complex the issue, the more prone communication is to being lost. – Andrew S. Grove, …

Rails generators reminders

First: use them! Most frameworks have a project boilerplate and that’s it. Rails’ ability to quickly lay down a conventional resource, model, or anything else is a productivity …

Notes on focus and attention

Focus and attention are inputs to producing excellent things. All the talent in the world won't get me far if I’m not focused or attention isn't working in my favor. Beyond my …

The funk is in the notes you don’t play

Funk is unique amongst musical genres, in my perspective, due to the importance of the notes you don’t play. The space between notes, and not “shredding” every possible moment, is …

The LFG called life

LFG: looking for game. An ad-hoc scheme, often forum-esque, where strangers looking to play an online game that lacks matchmaking find each other and coordinate starting a game. No …

You have more writing material than you think

Jim Nielsen, Blogging and Composting: But as a byproduct of whatever you’re building you undoubtedly learned, observed, or cursed at something along the way. And if you blog, you …

Weekend in Portland

Day two: breakfast, books, public transit! Tina Fey and Amy Poehler (surprise guest: Maya Rudolph!) put on an excellent show. (Not pictured: very, very cold.) Grits ’n Gravy. …

Work in progress

I’ve had this sitting prominently in my Muse workspace for a while. Seems like a good time to deploy it now. What if it’s all work in progress? Just sharing/publishing the process …

Weekend in Portland

Day one, travel day. Air travel is fine. Green carpets are green. It’s cold and dreary, as expected. There may be snow. We persevere.

Obsidian + LLMs

My experiments (with obsidian-copilot) have yet to yield a satisfying intersection between LLMs and Obsidian. I generally find OpenAI’s models write too much like breathless …

Journal for work/life/everything

Ray Grasso, Long Live the Work Journal: Keep a journal for work, champions. It’s pretty easy to get started—just create a text file. Throw in a new heading each day and write down …

The status quo

Most fascinating game there is, keeping things from staying the way they are. – Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano The status quo is a hell of a thing. Path dependence makes this a …

Low-key CSS libraries

I like the idea and execution of Tailwind. That said, there’s something nice about dropping a CSS library reference into a new HTML file and getting styled content without adding …

Software makes you more productive, otherwise it’s (weird) art

Rands in Repose, Seven Steps to Fixing Stalled To-Do Tasks: The never-ending question you must ask regarding whatever productivity system you’ve built is, “Does this system make …

2023 by the bullets

Places visited Marfa, Texas Las Cruces, New Mexico Tucson, Arizona Disney World (Orlando, Florida) Disneyland (Anaheim, California) Prunedale, California Salinas, California …

Low-key tools-for-thought

I have an elaborate, perhaps baroque, setup of journals, notes, tasks, highlights, read-it-laters, feeds, and canvases-for-thinking. I consider it a crucial, and very …

iA Writer and AI

Writing with AI: Writing is not about getting letters on a page. It’s not about getting done with text. It’s finding a clear and simple expression for what we feel, mean, and want …

Celebrate the van Beethoven guy

It’s Ludwig van Beethoven’s birthday. Here are a few ways to celebrate the old piano-biter: small: try his other famous piano sonata, No. 8 “Pathetique” medium: try the third …

ui.land

ui.land is an interview site at the crossroads of design and engineering. Rauno Freiberg: Trying to create software with tiny details that feel exciting to build, experience, and …

Notes on strategy and execution

Will Larson, How to Size and Assess Teams From an Eng Lead at Stripe, Uber and Digg. This pull-quote lead me through some juicy lines of thinking: Inflection points are just …

Organize for Discovery

S-tier programming skill: organize code and behavior such that others can discover and understand it out later without your presence/consultation. S-tier writing skill: organize a …

Sidestep process by sharing tangible progress

Nat Bennett: Cannot overstate the value of regularly delivering working software. My single most effective software dev habit is to start with a walking skeleton – a “real” if very …

Notes on focus

I’ve tried a bunch of things, over the years, to find time and discipline to focus on working the tasks and projects that are meaningful to me. Mostly it boils down to actually …

Everything’s a draft

Publish pretty much everything you write because you can’t predict what is going to be popular. There is a lower bar for quality, but barring dishonesty and literally unreadable …

Zawinski's law, updated

Every program attempts to expand until it can read email (the original) invite a friend check off tasks in a list record consent to receiving cookies or storing data in the United …

Listening, November 2023

Andre 3000, New Blue Sun – come for the over-the-top song titles, stay for what sounds to me like an ambient and (astral?) jazz album. Earth, Wind, and Fire, “Serpentine Fire” – …

You can’t read the whole internet, so put your energy into something that matters to you

Oliver Burkeman, Treat your to-read pile like a river: To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and …

Smaller barriers to entry, bigger possibilities

James Somer, A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft | The New Yorker: In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by A.I., a player’s only hope is pairing up with a …

My summer at 100 hertz

Is there a lost art to writing code without a text editor, or even a (passable) computer? It sounds romantic, I’ve done it before, I tried it again, and…it was not that great. …

Tooling has improved for ambitious software developers

Tools for working on software in the large1 have improved a lot over since I last considered them ten years ago.

Saying No is the first step

Ryan Holiday, 35 and 34, 36 Lessons on the Way to 36 Years Old: As part of that, I made the difficult decision to call my publisher to push my next book a year or so. This was a …

Have principles, will travel

Pirijan, Kinopio’s Design Principles: The more unique and definitive your values are, the more useful they’ll be as a decision making tool later on. These are some of the …

Top of Mind No. 6

I’ve been thinking a lot about setting expectations and goals. I have an idea about setting expectations on how we practice software development in teams and four pillars thereof. …

Build for the excitement of building

Nice Tietz-Sokolskaya, Write more “useless” software: When you spend all day working on useful things, doing the work, it’s easy for that spark of joy to go out. … Everything you …

The pace you’re reading is the right pace for you to read

Ted Gioia, My Lifetime Reading Plan: IT’S OKAY TO READ SLOWLY I tell myself that, because I am not a fast reader. By his accounts, Gioia is a prolific and thorough reader. And yet, …

Inside you, there are two or more brains

David Hoang, Galaxy Brain, Gravity Brain, and Ecosystem Brain: The Galaxy Brain thinkers are in 3023 while we're in 2023. They relentlessly pursue the questions, “What if?” …

I’m not your cool uncle

I find that playing the “I’m the leader, this is the decision, go forth and do it” card is not fun and almost always wrought with unintended consequences. A notable exception is …

The Textual framework

Textual is a Rapid Application Development framework for Python, built by Textualize.io. Build sophisticated user interfaces with a simple Python API. Run your apps in the terminal …

Stop writing

George Saunders on getting past self-critical/low-energy writing spirals (aka one of the many forms of writer’s block): Another thing I sometimes suggest is this: stop writing. …

Build with language models via llm

llm (previously) is a tool Simon Willison is working on for interacting with large language models, running via API or locally. I set out to use llm as the glue for prototyping …

Read papers, work tutorials, the learning will happen

(Previously: Building a language model from scratch, from a tutorial) I started to get a little impatient in transcribing linear algebra code from the tutorial into my version. In …

Building a language model from scratch, from a tutorial

I’m working from Brian Kitano’s Llama from scratch (or how to implement a paper without crying). It’s very deep, so I probably won’t make it all the way through the long-weekend …

Link directly to stations in Apple Music

Generate Apple Music URLs via Apple Music Marketing Tools. Query by song, album, basically anything you can search in the Music.app sidebar. e.g. WEFUNK radio, long URL: …

I got better at estimating projects with intentional practice

I like the idea of practicing1, in the musical or athletic sense, at professional skills to rapidly improve my performance and reduce my error rate. When I was a music major2, I …

A vacation is a tool for disconnecting

I’m reflecting1 on travelogue’ing my recent trip to Disneyland. In particular, that it was effective at taking my mind off work while maintaining creative writing and publishing …

Rauno Freiburg is building attention to design details

Sitting down and just thinking hard does not magically produce valuable discoveries either. The essence of the word “interaction” implies a relationship between a human and an …

Work side-by-side; the more you can see, the more you can think

Wisen Tanasa, Stop flipping around, put them side-by-side: This constant flipping is a self-inflicted cognitive load that reduces our productivity. Pay attention to what’s …

Magic (AI) is what we don’t (yet) understand

It reflects a sound understanding of the nature of AI — as an uncredited and formless modifier of other technologies. One whose presence is marked by familiar behaviors having …

Less but better

The Designer’s Designer’s Watch – A Look Back At Braun And The Rebirth Of A Few Classics The Braun watches AW 10 and AW 50 embody simplicity. Just as do the clocks and electrical …

When finished isn’t done

The work is done, the post is published, the code has shipped, the boxes are all checked. And yet, it remains in my head. The bit of code I’d like to revisit, an edge I couldn’t …

Charles Chamberlain

An “independent researcher & developer focused on making new interfaces to create with”. He’s developing some neat low road (in the How Buildings Learn sense) ideas at the …

The Bear

I watched seasons 1 and 2 over the course of a few weeks. Fantastic show, no notes. I can’t start to describe it. It’s not crime-y, not a comedy. It’s not exactly feel good, but it …

Shortcuts for scripting API integration

If you want to do straight-forward API scripting, Shortcuts + Actions might do the trick. Patterns in play: Fetch URL (Shortcuts built-in) Parse document as feed/JSON/XML (not sure …

Use Swift Playgrounds to sketch ideas

Before spinning up a whole Swift project, use Swift Playgrounds to sketch out ideas. In Xcode (macOS): File -> New -> Playground Choose “Single View” (I’m not sure what impact …

In the moment

Is pessimism about the past, present, or future? If it says, “we can’t get there from here, based on where we’ve been”, it neglects the present and maybe the future. Does optimism …

Fruitless activities and hobbies are important!

Anything you do that doesn’t make you money or help others better be something for your own damned amusement. – Austin Kleon

"If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is"

Kurt Vonnegut: And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’ It’s a kind of way to …

Monk and Robot: very enjoyable chill-future vibes

Monk and Robot, A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers. An optimistic, non-space/techno sci-fi short novel. For me, it’s a welcome departure from the Very Serious Ideas of …

Notes on narrative for engineering leaders

Alex Reeve, 22 Principles for Great Product Managers: You have to own the narrative. When there’s a narrative vacuum, people will “creatively” fill in the blanks themselves—and you …

"It sounded like the kick drum was played by a drunk 3-year old, and I was like ‘Are you allowed to do that?’”

WONKY – pudding.cool analyzes what makes J Dilla special. Particularly good if Dilla Time (previously) is still in your to-read list.

Don’t zero out the margins

Efficiency is the enemy, Farnam Street: It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack. It’s also …

Three meditations on wins

Leaders (and managers) are successful to the extent that their teams and peers notch wins. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove calls this the “output” of a manager, and wrote the book on …

Improving when you can’t rinse and repeat

You can’t practice at some things. Putting the cat back in the bag or the toothpaste back in the tube. The undoable, the things that you can’t unsay. The measure twice cut once …

Top of Mind No. 5

Like everyone (it seems), I’m exploring how large language model copilots/assistants might change how I work. A few of the things that have stuck with me: Use LLMs to reduce the …

Err the Blog, revisited

Before there was GitHub, there was Err the Blog. Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett wrote one of the essential Rails blogs of early Rails era. Therein, many of the idioms and ideas we …

Writing is a "do it, somehow, every day" game

Whenever I find myself wishing I was posting more toots/articles/etc., I remind myself that the first step is to get words out of my head and onto the page. The hack is that “the …

Focus in a time of distraction

That is, some notes on helping junior developers focus on execution when they are surrounded by the twin distractions of novelty and outright broken things. With apologies to Love …

Reading, February 2023

I’m still reading about the Manhattan Project. The going is slow. Big books, big timelines. At least, for the speed at which I read. Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb – I’m 500+ …

Write linked notes so you don’t have to remember

Writing linked notes helps engineering makers and managers alike develop the super-powers of augmented memory and the appearance of effective multitasking. I’m revisiting Simon …

Top of Mind No. 4

The practice of building software/technology is going through a phase shift. We’ve worked from abundance the past few years. Now we have to figure out which developments are worth …

Natasha Lyonne is my generation’s Joe Pesci

Poker Face is a gem. Do yourself a favor and start watching it[1]. I didn’t realize I needed a weekly murder mystery kind of show. But I did, in this specific form. Poster image of …

Make code better by writing about it

Writing improves thoughts and ideas. Doubly so for thoughts and ideas about code. Writing, about software or otherwise, is a process wherein: thoughts and ideas are clarified ideas …

Corporate personhood and ants

Filtered for ants and laws, Matt Webb: Let’s say we could chat with ants. Could we trade with them? What would we want from them? … In short: people treat almost everything as …

Turn the pages. Read the code. Hear the words.

“Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.” — Robert Caro, Working So goes the wisdom super-biographer Robert Caro received from a mentor when he was an …

Remote work skills today look like being online in my youth

Checking my emails frequently. Responding to a few group/direct-message chats at a time. Managing to write code, do math, or put together a slideshow/essay at the same time. Always …

Songs You Must Listen To At Maximum Safest Volume

“Uptight”, Steve Wonder “Summertime Blues”, The Who “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, The Beach Boys “Good Vibrations”, The Beach Boys “Jungleland”, Bruce Springsteen “Once In a Lifetime”, …

Top of Mind No. 3

Working in small increments towards medium-to-large projects or outcomes is tricky. I too frequently find myself down a much deeper rabbit hole than I’d intended. And I’ve spent a …

Albums You Should Listen To From Start To Finish

Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen Blood Sugar Sex Magik, Red Hot Chili Peppers Pet Sounds, The Beach Boys The Blueprint, Jay-Z Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder Sign ‘O The …

The nap hierarchy

Doing a short snooze in the middle of the day? I highly recommend it if you have the means. Ideally, one of these places (in order by quality of rest): Couch nap Chair nap …

Bruce Springsteen Epochs

Motown Bohemian, curly hair, The Wild, The Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle Denim, muscles, Born in the USA The introspective wanderer, bolo tie, Human Touch Revival, the …

What A Guitar Is Supposed To Sound Like

“Summertime Blues”, The Who, Pete Townsend “Estranged”, Guns ’n Roses, Slash “Glory Days”, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band “Highway to Hell”, AC/DC, Angus Young

Music I Wish I Had Written

The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky The Planets, Gustav Holst “Good Vibrations”, Brian Wilson “Losing My Edge”, James Murphy “I Feel the Earth Move”, Carole King

Best David Lee Roth Mid-Song Banter

“Unchained” “Everybody Wants Some” “Hot for Teacher”

Best of 2022

Television: Severance (Apple TV), Andor (Disney+) Movie: Everything Everywhere All At Once Music: deep dives into Carly Simon, Nina Simone, J Dilla Book: Player Piano by Kurt …

Classical music that is terribly edited in commercials

“Also Sprach Zarathustra”, Richard Strauss, the opening “Symphony No. 6”, Beethoven the rest of the Western classical music canon

Think your thoughts

We live in the most amazing time for ideas. They’re all over the place. It’s never been easier to share them, and indeed they are shared at a phenomenal pace1. It’s so easy to find …

Top of Mind No. 2

How I work: what might “pairing” with a language model-based assistant (e.g. GPT-3) look like? How I build: the tension between the web platform being more capable than ever versus …

An ideal weekend

Nothing, nothing, nothing makеs me happy Nothing brings me nothing but joy So if you haven’t tried nada I really think you oughta — C. Fischoeder, Bob’s Burgers On minor funks, …

One thing at a time, incrementally

Only Solve One New Problem At A Time, Ben Nadel: The example he gives in the episode is "learning Golang". Understanding how to use Golang was a new problem for the company. As …

How I would explain music to an alien

Were I faced with an intelligence not of this earth, but one that shares our understanding of what music is/for, these are the exemplars I would hold up for them to understand our …

Dilla Time

Dilla Time is a great book for music history enthusiasts. If you’re at all interested in hip-hop, music production, or sample culture, it’s a must-read. The references to …

Get professional value out of the next Twitter-like thing

The Bird hit another inflection point on Friday. Now, many people, myself included, are looking at alternatives or actively decamping1. It was quite a thing to experience. Several …

Currently digging

Listening: Afrobeat, e.g. Fela Kuti Best musical discovery this week: an excellent Apple Music playlist Shapeshifting, catalogs jazz fusion with indie, hip-hop, electronic; all the …

Updating Eisenhower on planning

Previously: a long time ago, Dwight Eisenhower probably said something to the effect of: “Plans are useless, but planning is essential”. Today, software development (and knowledge …

Mastodon & Me, 2nd Edition

A few years ago, I set up a Mastodon account on a now-defunct instance. It didn’t scare me away, is kinda neat in some ways, the Bird has gone chaotic, and so I’m at it again. Like …

Sketching yields quantity yields quality

The Art of Sketching: Strategies for Getting Started: Edouard Manet, the French modernist painter, once gave a still-life painting lesson to another French impressionist, Eva …

Certified Jams

“Rhythm Nation”, Janet Jackson “Holding Out For a Hero”, Bonnie Tyler “Footloose”, Kenny Loggins “Partyman”, Prince

Top of Mind No. 1

Delegating: supporting teammates, delivering the right context, setting good outcomes/goals. Not delegating: managing/mitigating risk, resolving unknowns. “Delegate downhill work, …

Programming excellence: a small matter of practice

The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your …

Currently digging

Obsession: Ferraris - they’re at a whole other level. Listening: Ramsey Lewis, “Japanese ambient” Watching: Andor, She-Hulk Reading: Welcome to the Monkey House - Vonnegut short …

Write more, coder inspiration, queryable coding environments

Simon Willison on writing about one's work: A tip for writing more: expand your definition of completing a project (any project, no matter how small) to include writing a blog post …

Peak Aerosmith

Permanent Vacation, Pump, Get a Grip, Nine Lives. That’s an excellent run of albums. It was considered a renaissance at the time. IMO, it’s their best stuff1. Moreover, the peak of …

The Flipping Table(s)

This is a story about a tiny toy table. Well, a couple of them. Courtney and I play pub quiz, a lot. We play with a regular group of people at a couple of venues across town. We …

Onboarding when you don't have access to the team

Mitchell Hashimoto, Contributing to Complex Projects: The first step to understanding the internals of any project is to become a user of the project. You do not have to become an …

Great Albums: Little Rock

Or: Texas, the Good Parts. (Despite the title!) Or: it sounds like Texas, to me. (Again, despite the title.) Hayes Carll is my favorite under-the-radar, “this is what country music …

An un-conference appears

I jumped into a short un-conference organized/hosted by Andy Matuschak last weekend. Within this humble Gather, I came across lots of intriguing people and energizing ideas. Some …

Very handsome task tracking, offline and online

About a year ago, I added a curiously pretentious object to my repertoire of productivity hacks. Analog is a) a paper productivity notation not unlike Bullet Journaling b) printed …

Dad rock is a beautiful tapestry

Spooky dad rock - Trent Reznor Sad dad rock - the National, LCD Soundsystem Quirky dad rock - Cake Over-enthusiastic dad rock - Foo Fighters

Perspective, you want it

Perspective is the lens we view our world, work, relationships, etc. All the luck, resources, or knowledge in the world are wasted without good perspective. If we’re talking about …

Notes from the Miles-verse Part 3 and final thoughts

This ended up covering late Davis stuff. He’s basically inventing a new genre of jazz every album or two now. On the Corner: Davis invents funk/soul jazz. A Tribute to Jack …

Leadership keywords

My current theory of leading software teams and projects has four keywords: Trust: I assume everyone is working to get the job done. They assume I will help them get the job done. …

Managers can code on whatever keeps them off the critical path

Should engineering managers write code?: Spending time in meetings and working through complex team relationship issues leaves you feeling more drained than energized most days. …

The paradox of producing process

The agency to create the system or process you want to work in (axiomatically?) implies you’ll rarely get to work in the system because you’re spending a lot of time working on the …

Notes from the Miles-verse Parts 1 and 2

Wherein I’m listening to Miles Davis’ studio albums in chronological order. Priors: I have listened to Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew a lot. I’m mostly familiar with “earl years” …

Get lost in an idea

Rabbit-hole-athon - it doesn’t look like an event is scheduled, but I dig the idea: Tl;dr, we are organizing a weekend long IRL rabbit-hole-athon for technologists: an intimate …

Two snappy covers

I saw this local band Adam’s Farm (no relation, promise) a few times when I was 15 or so. In the era of mixing bass guitar out of rock music (no thanks, Metallica), these fellows …

Like caveats? Try writing about leading teams!

It's tricky to write about leading software teams. Herein, reflections, not complaints, on pursuing higher software leadership truths. Many of which are riffs on 4 Reasons Writing …

Benchmarking Rails apps in 5 bullets

When in doubt, measure. Twice! For ad-hoc/napkin estimates, I use Benchmark.ms { …the code… } to size up the performance of Ruby code. When I want to do The Science to compare …

Logistics is endless intrigue

The modern marvel that moves commodities, sub-assemblies, finished product, and people across the planet is largely invisible. Except when I’m bumped from an overbooked flight. Or …

Beethoven’s symphonies, visualized and interpreted

This is extremely my jam. Beethoven Symphonies Abstracted: To accompany the National Symphony Orchestra’s Beethoven & American Masters concert series, author and illustrator Mo …

Cool things to do with your spaceship besides launching billionaires

Fancy some near-term imagination on the opportunities the re-commercialization of space presents us? Yes, have some! Science upside for Starship: It is, however, a fun exercise to …

Great albums: Blood Sugar Sex Magick

Favorite tracks: “Suck My Kiss”, “Sir Psychosexy”, “Power of Equality”, “The Righteous & the Wicked”. The essential (in my opinion) Red Hot Chili Peppers album is, for me, a few …

My favorites of 2021

Gotta sneak this one in under the wire, otherwise it’s just a sparkling list of things. Movies Summer of Soul - Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone. Heck yes. Dune …

The Beatles 🤝 Timeless leadership lessons

The Economist, The Beatles and the art of teamwork: Take the role of Ringo, for example. When he is not actually playing, the band’s drummer spends most of his time either asleep …

A more evocative word for mega-corps

Kevin Kelly, The Third Way: Huge monopolistic companies running platforms like Facebook and Amazon are not mere corporations, nor are they governments, even though they have many …

Great albums: Endtroducing

Endtroducing is my canonical example of a revealing album. I heard “Building Steam With a Grain of Sand” completely accidentally in a college business writing class, of all places. …

Great albums: Beethoven Symphonies No. 7 & 8

These are my favorite of Beethoven’s “more approachable” symphonies. Symphony No. 9 is my favorite, but it requires a bit more context to take in. Further, it’s a solid seventy …

What makes a great album

There are four-ish kinds of great albums, in my mind: Pivotal albums: the artist or genre was distinctly different before and after the album came out. e.g., classical music was …

The finest transit system you’ll ever find in a swamp

Imagine all the busses, boats, monorails, trains, and gondolas in Disney World as (quasi-public) transit system. Then make a transit-style map of said system. It’s fun, but a …

Better know a standard library

Read your current/new language’s standard library. Highly recommended for developers of all experience levels. You’ll pick up the idioms, you’ll discover something useful. You’ll …

Offloading fast operations in Ruby by data structure

Noteflakes: A Compositional Approach to Optimizing the Performance of Ruby Apps — the idea is to offload “inner-loop”-type operations from Ruby to C-extensions. The clever twist is …

Don’t be spooky

It’s possibly the best advice for managers I've given so far. When you’re communicating with your team, lead with context and reassurance. Never message someone on your team, …

Would you pay more for a noisy computer?

Computers should expose their internal workings as a 6th sense, Matt Webb: I kinda miss the days when I could hear the hard drive of my computer. If it was taking a while to …

Into the Miles-verse

I’m kicking off a new “listening project” - Miles Davis. Inspired by A Beginner’s Guide to Miles Davis, I’m going to grind my way through the Miles-verse in chronological order. …

An exercise in CPU design, in the small

One Page CPU Project: Welcome to the OPC series of CPUs, where everything fits on one page - one page each for specification, emulation, HDL. For details see the OPC Project web …

Math-y and/or word-y

I'm a developer who (formerly) recoiled at math, especially calculus and matrices. Instead, I thought, I loved the language-y parts of software development. Programming languages, …

Following up on recommendations, for the forgetful

It’s hard to land music, books, etc. recommendations from friends because timing is everything. The best case is a recommendation for a thing I didn’t know of and it’s precisely …

Craig Mod’s simple search

Craig Mod, Fast, instant client side search for Hugo static site generator: I believe Fast Software is the Best Software and wanted keyboard-based, super fast search for my …

What makes an excellent design doc

Replicache Detailed Design(https://doc.replicache.dev/design): Replicache runs alongside your existing application infrastructure. You keep your existing server-side stack and …

“Rationalize and solve” doesn’t help someone who is venting

If you’re doing the whole servant leadership thing, you’re gonna hear some people venting frustrations. Yihwan Kim, When a 1:1 turns into a vent session: As an engineering manager, …

4 perspectives on writing

Spoiler alert: it’s all about organizing what they wrote in the past, finding it later, and remixing it into something they need in the moment. 🧠 Austin Kleon, Indexing, filing …

One priority is like wind in the sails

It’s true that I can scale myself, teams, and organizations to walk and chew gum at the same time, but it is surprisingly effective to focus on one thing at a time. This is the …

Desktop vibes

I’ve got three “virtual” desktops going on my Mac right now. The idea each is its own functional workspace. I don’t have three separate physical workspaces to do my …

Planning focuses our ideas

Planning is essential. But, not too much. Mostly in the next 90-day window (with apologies to Michael Pollan). Humans are, with few exceptions, awful at planning. It’s impossible …

Tumblelogs, a thousand weird flowers

I miss tumblelogs. Especially projectionist. Twitter and Tumblr fit the mold, functionally. But the vibe is not the same. That time right before centralized social media achieved …

Working, directly & small

Omar Rizwan recollects that one of the original selling points of React was that you could consolidate all the HTML, CSS, and JS for a single component in one file. No navigating …

The long game of notes

You can do a lot of fancy stuff with your notes these days. Backlinks, graphs, embedding, “transclusion”, knowledge databases, and digital gardens are all tempting sirens. But …

I never thought I'd think this much about wallpaper

Daveed Diggs mentioned this awesome wallpaper, Bay Area Toile, in a tour of his house. Amongst the Bay Area celebrities whose likenesses it features is Humpty Hump aka Shock G of …

Nina Simone, "Mississippi Goddam" 🤘

“This is a showtime, but the show hasn’t been written for it”

Let them go their own way

A mistake many newly minted (and some experienced) engineering managers (EMs) make is listening to their team (good!), discussing potential solutions and tradeoffs (good!), and …

A ripping yarn of hunting bugs in Destiny 2

The Case of the Missing Rewards - Luckily, in my many hours playing Destiny 2 I haven’t been bitten by this bug. Seeing behind the curtains of something I interact with so often is …

A good newsletter is an interesting conversation, not a monologue

A good email newsletter is like the conversation you may have had over coffee with an interesting pal. A surprising topic, a novel theory, perhaps an amusing tangent or two. I’m …

Walking through the current customer acquisition hypothesis

Paul Ford, The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office: Offices have their own mental maps. “Oh,” they say, “she’s moving to the 17th floor.” And everyone says: the 17th floor! …

CHONKR

I saw this BMW at Radwood in Austin last year. In hindsight, I would kinda like to know the whole story behind this car and the custom plate.

Notes on the invention of networked video gaming

QuakeWorld by John Carmack - the .plan notes (basically a Unix-local blog) written during the development of internet networking (not just LAN-local) for Quake. It’s amazing to …

Darlene Love re: Phil Spector 🔥

The Voices Of Black Women Were Essential To Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound Darlene Love began her partnership with Spector in 1962, when she came to the attention of Lester Sill, …

Hire based on outcomes instead of role descriptions

The first time I hired someone, I wish I’d known it’s much better to think about the outcomes you’re hiring for. With that in mind, work backwards to the experience and skills …

The unreasonable effectiveness of checklists

Checklists are a fantastic tool for thinking. This despite the existence of GTD, Kanban, PARA, and any number of ways to organize projects and figure out how to finish them. When …

Perspectives on creativity for 2021

Austin Kleon - A working from home manual in disguise: Make lists. You can be woke without waking to the news. Airplane mode can be a way of life. Naps are a secret weapon. David …

Sunset or Perlin noise?

Mike Perham: Redis is a Swiss-army knife

Mike Perham: Grouping Events for Later Processing: But we see enough traffic that we don’t want to turn every single click into a background job. We want to aggregate the clicks …

Better meetings (but also fewer, mostly)

Christof Damian, My thoughts on meetings: I used to really hate meetings. As a developer they seem to just get into the way of doing real work…But at some point you specialise, …

Annabel Scheme, the New Golden Gate, and the misplaced metropolitan nostalgia

Annabel Scheme and the Adventure of the New Golden Gate - a short story by Robin Sloan. Fantastic world building for a short story. Highly recommended. Nostalgia and the “this city …

Product Hunt’s async work: everyone in their own swimlane

How Product Hunt does asynchronous work: everyone in their own swimlane, unblocked. I really dig how they haven’t siloed work between front-end/back-end developers. Collaborative …

Onboard new teammates with a 90-day plan

My new boss had written up a 90-day plan for me the week before I started. This was perfect timing. I was already starting to put a bow on my current work and my focus was …

Use a tag line that means something

I like that Ember's tagline is about ambition.

Use factories to create jumbo object graphs

The entire time I’ve been using FactoryBot, several years at this point, I’ve used it one factory at a time: company = create(:company, name: "Acme, Inc.") alice = create(:user, …

How to succeed at blogging by not even trying too hard

“Perfect is the enemy of shipped” - Simon Willison 15 rules for blogging - Matt Webb Lists, emoji, and consistency are totally working for Duncan Davidson

Failure = entropy due to adding humans

Here’s a real dinger of a sentence from Michael Lopp’s latest, The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well: Failure is created by the increasing entropy of a growing number of …

iOS feature request: write-only interfaces & "smoke-break"

Two iOS wishlist items: Any app that can send & receive messages (emails, direct messages, photos, chats, tweets, etc.) should require a narrow, write-only affordance for sending a …

Writing is thinking, so write about code

Writing clarifies thinking. Therefore, writing design docs clarifies one’s thinking about code. Design Docs at Google and an example/meta design doc from the same author are great …

Bradford Fults on feedback and human bias

A Better Approach to 360° Feedback: Bradford Fults shares ways to route around fallible human memory and gather useful information when it comes to review season. Humans also have …

Conceptual tools for thinking

Untools is a collection of mental models for thinking about problems, projects, and ideas. For example, the latest tool, the Cynefin framework is useful for assessing the kind of …

The project management corollary to Hofstadter's Law

Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law. Corollary: It always takes more repetitions to tell people what you're …

Towards smaller JavaScript

The JavaScript ecosystem’s gone to a strange place where dense frameworks and complex tooling are the status quo. But, there are data-points suggesting the pendulum could swing …

The possibility of software through the ages

The gestalt of what's new in software and how it's changing our world has evolved over the decades. In the ‘90s, it was “don’t make me think!”. User interfaces went from text-based …

The Revenge of the Intuitive and developer tools in 2020

The Revenge of the Intuitive - Brian Eno lamented the downsides of a modern, computer-based recording console. Twenty years ago! The trade-offs for “freedom” at the expense of …

They say never let a good crisis go to waste

We should use the pandemic to reevaluate how we value service, child care, and education labor. It’s apparent we undervalued them. Their value is now explicit for those clamoring …

One strong center and two senses stimulated

I rented a 12-year old Porsche Boxster via Turo this weekend. Good app, great car. I’m shopping older German convertibles for my next car. Paying a little to rent a prospective car …

Tools for plain-text thinking

Margin is a plain text notation for thinking in lists, notes, and structured data. I have a soft spot for notations for thinking like, e.g. Markdown, TaskPaper, even bullet …

Manage for time and mental burden

Features in software are answers to questions. How can customers send what they're looking at to someone else? That's share via email. How can customers distill all the data about …

Graphs are the new hierarchies

In the sense that trees of people (managers and reports, ala Taylorism) are the old guard. Data (folders and files) are old sauce and nodes + edges are new sauce. In the sense that …

Top of Mind No. 0

Managing a backend engineering team at Pingboard. Managers can, and should, do deep work. What forms does that take? You can build anything from trust; how do you turn …

Whiteboard, even if you're a distributed team

A lot of us are out here, amongst all the strangeness of the world, trying to figure out how to help our teams adjust to collaborating remotely. It’s long been my observation that …

Wherein the “good old days” are revisited

Remember secretaries and drinking at work? And land-line telephones? And smoking inside? Blech! And an even more unequal society with even more thumbs on the scales? My wife and I, …

Use as few rules as possible, mostly guidelines

Rules won’t solve your problems, but thinking about them might. To paraphrase a couple well-known quotes: “Rules are useless, but thinking about rules is indispensable” Dwight …

Keep in touch with friends, the littlest CRM that could

This year, I’m trying to better keep in touch with friends, family, and former co-workers. It came to my attention that this is, in many ways, a thing for which you would use a …

Enforce system consistency at the boundaries & meditations on run-time type systems

(…continuing a Twitter thread) io-ts caught my attention a while back and I finally had the chance to read through it. I’m glad folks are experimenting in this area, particularly …

The Beautiful Ones

Prince’s unfinished memoir, The Beautiful Ones is a quick, but awkward, read. The preface is the most coherent, the story of how the editor, Dan Piepenbring, ended up being chosen …

I watched the various Watchmen

I just finished reading the Watchmen graphic novel and it is amazing. I was drawn in by the HBO series last year, which amplified my enjoyment of the original story. It might end …

Get a cute credit card and overtip

Highly recommend: get a BB-8 or similarly lovely icon from your favorite mythology on the credit/debit card you most frequently use. I have a couple lovely bonus conversations with …

Keep waterfall out of your agile

An insightful thing my pal Brandon Hays observed is that teams introduce little bits of waterfall into their agile processes when they get burned by scope expansion, bugs, …

Unblocking oneself

Succeeding and thriving at remote work is largely about getting very good at asynchronous (Slack, discussion threads, email, etc.) and nearly-asynchronous (phone calls, video …

Sharing context in code review

A nice guide on code reviews (unfortunately no author is attributed on the Notion doc) is making the rounds. If you do code reviews, you should read it. If you don’t, you should …

Reading massive tomes: less slog, more joy

I’m drawn to expansive views on a subject. Sprawling narratives are irresistible. Giant books are my weakness. It’s rewarding to finish a chunky, 500-page book but getting there is …

Little victories amongst the bigger vision

A couple of my favorite Ruby friends mentioned that they’re trying to keep their side projects small. Despite that very practical aspiration, the siren call of larger projects …

When management clicks

As a manager, I hear about things that are interesting and things that probably need changing. “We want to do three projects but only have two teams.” “The next production release …

Three (increasingly wild) bits about Prince

As unreleased material trickles out of the Prince estate, some fantastic stories have emerged. I haven’t yet read The Beautiful Ones, but even the stories that aren’t part of his …

Contracts made older objects better

Developers love contracts, i.e. types and type systems. Except, and especially, when they don’t. Contracts tell us, this module has a few functions and they definitely take these …

Training & Learning

A thing I’ve learned from weightlifting (also from Destiny, but that’s a whole other thing), is the value of showing up several times a week and putting in the right kind of work. …

William Gibson in the New Yorker

How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real - I gotta read more Gibson; just as soon as I finish all the Stephenson. 🤦‍♂️ One of them showed him an episode of “Cops,” the …

Options everywhere

Setting roadmaps and key results feel like truthful, strategic work. But the flip side is, if you approach them at face value or don’t focus on the outcome, they reduce the ability …

Taking notes on paper vs. glass in 2019

Software (currently, GoodNotes) and hardware (iPad Pro + Apple Pencil) are finally to a point where glass is competitive with paper (currently, Studio Neat Panobook, previously …

How regressions happen

Working with software is frustrating, and working on software doubly so, because things up and break. Seemingly without warning or cause. One day the software is fine, the next day …

My 2019 routine, your mileage may vary

I'm having a moment where I feel like I've got a winning wakeup/morning formula 🎊. Wake up early, around 6:30am. Feed the cats so they don't barf in protest later. Skim the tweets …

Sometimes you have to compile a list of known issues and ship

“’tis better to have known a software bug than to have never had a software at all” Lord Alfred Tennyson, except not Software that never ships never has issues. Draw the line, get …

Supporting remote work when you're co-located

Dave Rupert, Everything I Know About Remote Work. Me, everything I know about working with remote workers when you're co-located: Every single meeting has a video link.If one …

Writing to a past version of myself

Left to my own devices, I write in the second person. With apologies to my high school English teachers, I have a justification for this: I’m writing to myself from one, five, ten, …

Your father's janky graphs these are not

You can Graphviz on the web now. Roughly-drawn sketch style, slightly Swiss modernism, or even in the design tool Figma. Mostly enabled by a port of Graphviz to Web Assembly via …

Locality, module systems, coherence

Michael Feathers on locality in software design: You have locality when you don’t have to look beyond your gaze to understand how you are affected or how you affect. I find …

The Longines Heritage Military 1938

The deep-black, serene face on this watch is a real winner. The numbering and proportions are also ace.

I guess Brian Wilson didn't recede into his pocket dimension after all

Who sang lead the most on each Beach Boys album? - Brian Wilson is way more active after Pet Sounds than I would have imagined.

Team organization matters

On team composition and the distribution of higher/lower experience team members: Even though pretty much any team can deliver results, suboptimal team composition is still a …

Things makes a nice landing pad

One of the better productivity ideas I’ve seen over the years is using some app as a landing pad for all the random ideas, recommendations, and notes I come across in the moment. …

The desirable qualities of good tests

I often say that learning test-driven development is comparable to learning a whole other programming language. The practice of TDD is a mirror world of depth and trade-offs. Kent …

The full-text search future we were promised

I’ve been reorganizing some notes and considering moving specific topics/tags out of Bear. Turns out I can search across Bear, OmniOutliner, Ulysses, and random text files on my …

Automotive function determines form

I generally think function should have a strong influence on form, if not determine the form outright. I like to use cars an example of this, but I’m having trouble reconciling the …

Social media in the morning? Whichever.

Austin Kleon recommends skipping the news/social media/blinky lights in the morning. I’ve found this works great for me, and sometimes not! I’m a morning person, so I’ve got that …

Blogging, like writing, is challenging

The thing which makes blogging difficult is not engagement, analytics, finding just the right theme, curating to a newsletter, managing comments, finding reach after the demise of …

Currently intriguing: Toby Shorin

I'm currently intrigued by, and not entirely sure what to do with, the ideas of Toby Shorin. Particularly, Jobs To Be Done and The Desire for Full Automation. The thread of design …

The paradox of event sourcing

The hardest part for me is knowing when to use this. It creates a lot of friction for a small application, but all applications start small. Moving to an event-sourced architecture …

Self-directed rabbit holes (rather than reading All The Topics)

Tyler Cowen: go down self-directed rabbit holes rather than reading the “definitive tomes” on broad-ish topics you’re curious about: Let’s say you want to read some books on …

Reclaim the hacker mindset

There was a time when the hacker mindset was about something nice. They’ve adopted a hacking mindset. They translate this clever, ethical, enjoyable, excellence-seeking behaviour …

Personal choices outperform technology choices

This dinger at the end of Mattt’s WWDC wrap-up is everything: Taking care of yourself — sleeping enough, eating right, exercising regularly — will do more to improve your …

No topic is off-limits

My favorite thing about software development is the breadth and depth of the profession. On the one hand, there’s a ton to learn about computer science, programming languages, …

Problem solvers

We could be problem-solving technologists. We could avoid getting wrapped up in programmer elitism and tribal competition. We might solve more problems that way! We can still find …

Postmodernism rules everything around me

Greater Los Angeles - Geoff Manaugh. Remember when an iPhone had trouble with cellular reception if you put your fingers in the wrong place and a response that was overblown and …

Thea Flowers - From API keys to tamper-proof encryption

I didn’t expect Thea Flowers’ Building a stateless API proxy to end up explaining public-key cryptography and motivating JSON Web Tokens (JWT) from first principles. But it did! …

I'm the bug

Write about how computer programs are fun to solve and everyone can solve programming problems Run into a computer program that involves multiple black boxes in multiple computer …

If time is money, investing time in your tests can save money

Sam Saffron - Tests that sometimes fail. Fantastic advice on maintaining a test suite over time. A test suite is either an albatross or an asset, depending on the quality of effort …

These are computers, I know this

An encouraging thing happened to me last year. I was faced with a mystery involving how a bit of application code was interacting with ActiveRecord. It seemed like we were calling …

“I don’t know everything, but I can learn anything.”

Rachel McQuater, On Becoming a Wizard: Strategies for Keeping Up as a New Developer: The difference was that wizard developers perceived problems as artifacts of error by rational …

The damn dumbest smart kid I know

Partial explanation for smart folks, like Paul Graham or Mark Zuckerberg, making consistently bad predictions - The Peculiar Blindness of Experts: In Tetlock’s 20-year study, both …

Chernobyl on HBO

We’re three episodes into the Chernobyl miniseries. Great acting, sets, and costumes. I had no idea how much worse the historical situation could have gone. Recommend.

Web assembly + browser editor + CDN edge = wow

I’m still impressed that the web platform has progressed to the point we can build web apps entirely in the browser with Glitch, Code Sandbox, and friends. That we are now starting …

Music ranked: the string section

Best albums, singles of the years. Who is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. Top 100 smooth jazz to fall asleep to. We love to put music into boxes and then rank the items …

A foray into building interface

I spent some time this weekend attempting to make front-end code with Tailwind CSS. Tailwind is a utility-first approach to CSS wherein styles are organized into classes by how …

Refreshing my Rails: OmniAuth

I’m refreshing my understanding of mainstay Rails libraries lately1. This week, it’s OmniAuth. When you sign-in (authenticate) to website A (say dev.to) via website B (say GitHub), …

Gorillaz & Moby & Van Vaudeville & Soulection

Gorillaz, Demon Days - this one holds up, still a solid album. News to me, Moby has been making extended ambient tracks in some manner of partnership with the Calm app. They make …

Robocalls. What a concept!

They’re on our phones, in our voicemails. Computers or sometimes even humans calling in massive volumes, funneling people into bad purchases. Questionable insurance at best, …

How we get back to space

Space isn’t a dead-end, it’s just taking us longer to figure out than our earliest trajectory. The New Yorker has a great look at The Race to Develop the Moon for industrial …

The notes - May 6, 2018

Unclogging the blog pipes here… Think better I feel seen - Satisfaction and progress in open-ended work: For more open-ended problems, much of the challenge lies in figuring out …

What makes Into the Wide Open such a great album?

Into the Great Wide Open strikes me as a singular album. Perhaps it’s not even the best Tom Petty album, but it stands out from the rest in some kind of way. Maybe it’s nostalgia? …

Coding without a computer, designing without a design

A thing I want to try is coding offline, per se. Without a functional computer (like a tablet). Think first. Outline and sketch a solution. Maybe pseudocode it up. Then fill it in …

Vacation reads

It used to be that all the programmers were ladies. Arguably, they were higher skilled programmers since they didn’t have little luxuries like text editors, REPLs, and online …

Why are you building this?

At some point in what feels like the very distant past, I bought The Shape of Design by Frank Chimero. For six years, apparently, I’ve flipped past it on the way to reading other …

Little (Rust) learning victories

I’m attempting to learn Rust. And really make it stick this time around. A lot of the “making it stick” part is making lists and having the discipline to stick with crossing items …

Pardon the dust, learning in progress

I’m trying a few things while I learn how ray-tracers work: learning Rust and graphics programming collecting my thoughts and discoveries in the repo, aka blogging doing it all in …

We don't have to agree about code style

Will we ever come to agree on writing code? Ruby folks like short methods. One-liners even; maybe for their concision, maybe to show off their language and code golfing skill. …

It's 2019 and I'm signing my jokes like its 2019

A stranger walks into an elevator. I say “how about this weather?!” They smirk, or let out a small laugh. It’s easy to think, “I am funny guy!” But: that’s not a joke, it’s not …

Wherein a mind is kept clear(er)

A couple things making me feel more productive lately: Jot down a theme for the day: at the beginning or end of the day, I make up some kind of near-platitude to help me focus and …

Its never a bad time to educate the kids about their rock and roll heritage

Speaking of rowdy Springsteen: found this anachronistic and slightly surprising performance of “Ramrod" from the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards. www.youtube.com/watch Presumably he …

"Maximum theoretical sincerity"

Pitchfork: Talking Head: Remain in Light By 1980, the conflict in music between what was thought and what was felt was in full cry. As disco continued to monopolize music you could …

Wherein writing the dang memo is the easy part

Seth Godin, Get your memo read: The unanticipated but important memo has a difficult road. It will likely be ignored. I find this is one of the unexpected challenges of taking on …

Context buckets

Sometimes I ask myself: why did past Adam think this text/link/picture/etc. was important. Increasingly the answer is: put it in a bucket that makes the answer self-explanatory. …

Pick prolific: quantity, quality, and Chidi's Dilemma

Prolific is better than perfect, Jared Dees: “Perfect” is a mirage that no one knows how to reach. I’m fond of restating this in terms of the quantity/quality trade-off. It’s easy …

How I focus more and worry less about the internet

As a long time Rands fan, I highly recommend you partake of the Rands Information Practices and Rands Slack Protocol. Allow me to add some of my favorite tactics. Get your browser …

On decision tables and conditionals

Over the years, I’ve heard a few times about something like Decision Tables (Hillel Wayne): A decision table is a means of concisely representing branching and conditional …

My favorite question is “why?”

At some point in elementary or junior high school, we were taught all our essays should answer one of five questions: who, what, where, why, or how. These were, at the time, “the …

The systemic sublime makes our world more legible

My new favorite category on Kottke.org is the systemic sublime, wherein our networked, often inscrutable world is made more legible. The connections between ideas and and their …

It's dangerous to go alone, take dotfiles

Yesterday I was handed a fresh, nifty new laptop. This is, for me, mildly terrifying. Last time I did a clean operating system install was seven years ago. I’ve carried an …

Scribbling through TensorFlow.js

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around machine learning lately. Today I worked through the TensorFlow.js tutorial on recognizing handwritten numbers with a neural network. Herein, …

Code minutiae, October 23, 2017

For some reason, identifier schemes that are global unique, coordination-free, somewhat humanely-representable, and efficiently indexed by databases are a thing I really like. …

You must be this tall to ride the services

If I were trying to convince myself to extract a (micro)service, today, I’d do it like this. First I’d have a conversation with myself: you are making tactical changes slightly …

How methodical and quality might keep up with fast and loose

I’ve previously thought that a developer moving fast and coding loose will always outpace a developer moving methodically and intentionally. Cynically stated, someone making a mess …

A strange world of mathematical and computational complexity

Over the past few weekends, I’ve been reading on two topics which are way out of my technical confidence. I’ve spent the majority of my software development career building web …

Just keep writing, October 16, 2017

I watched pal Drew Yeaton work in Ableton briefly and it was pretty incredible. He laid down a keyboard and drums beat, fixed up all the off-beat stuff, and proceeded to tinker …

One step closer to a good pipeline operator for Ruby

I’ve previously yearned for something like Elm and Elixir’s |> operator in Ruby. Turns out, this clever bit of concision is in Ruby 2.5: object.yield_self {|x| block } → an_object …

Heck yeah, October 09, 2017

Simon Willison returns to blogging, in peak form nonetheless. Heck yeah! Janet Jackson, “Rhythm Nation”, posted by Billy Eichner. Heck yeah! A rocket engine made of nuclear …

Strange Loop 2017

I was lucky enough to attend Strange Loop this year. I described the conference to friends as a gathering of minds interested in programming esoterica. The talks I attended were …

Here’s a thing, October 05, 2017

As I endeavor to re-establish writing here as a regular and consistent project, I’m reminding myself of two things that helped me in the past. First and foremost, it’s about the …

exa in 30 seconds

What is it? exa is ls reimagined for modern times, in Rust. And more colorfully. It is nifty, but not life-changing. I mostly still use ls, because muscle memory is strong and its …

Generalization and specialization: more of column A, a little less of column B

Now, I attempt to write in the style of a tweetstorm. But about code. For my website. Not for tweets. For a long time, we have been embracing specialization. It's taken for granted …

The notes, October 04, 2017

I’m intrigued by folks having luck building virtualized development environments for localhost setups. It sounds like fun to work in this kind of workflow. I never want to do the …

Not-a-Science Science

Any field with the word "science" in its name is guaranteed not to be a science. – Gerald Weinberg, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking

Afternoon notes, October 03, 2017

Someone will always have a slicker Git workflow than you. For example,Auto-squashing Git Commits for clever rebasing. The passage of time is weird, lately. Nonetheless, it’s …

Morning notes, October 03, 2017

I like Bluebottle’s coffee subscription service a lot. The web app is well done and having coffee magically appear in my mailbox means I have far fewer “awww heck we’re out of …

The loungification of luxury cars

High-end luxury cars are starting to resemble first-class airport lounges and it’s bothering me. The Porsche Panamera has a dang tray table. Just about every German luxury car has …

Categorizing and understanding magical code

Sometimes, programmers like to disparage “magical code”. They say magical code is causing their bugs, magical code is offensive to use, magical code is harder to understand, we …

Fewer changes are faster to deploy than fewer changes

Itamar Turner-Trauring, Incremental results: how to succeed at large software projects: Faster feedback... Less unnecessary features... Less cancellation risk... Less deployment …

TIL: divide by 10 with this one weird number

Running an application across two physical databases is not a straightforward thing. One of the relatively easier ways to do it involves assigning each database instance a shard …

If I could imagineer Tomorrowland for a moment

A little bit of fan reflection on Transportation in Tomorrowland and how to revitalize it: When you visit Disneyland in California, how do you feel when you walk down Main Street, …

JavaScript's amazing reach

There’s plenty of room to criticize JavaScript as a technology, language, and community(s). But, when I’m optimistic, I think the big things JavaScript as a phenomenon brings to …

👍 Master of None Season 2

Just finished watching Master of None, season 2. What a great show. It’s hilarious without being campy, poignant without being a downer. Aziz Ansari is very good at this. Also, now …

If I were a producer: DJ Khaled

Actually, I probably wouldn’t change much. But I have questions about this marketing photo: [caption id=“attachment_4434” align=“aligncenter” width=“487”] People, do not pose with …

If I were a producer: Muse

I have feelings about Muse, but let’s talk about this particular song I’m listening to right now: “Big Freeze” off The 2nd Law. In general, I would overgeneralize Muse’s music as …

I welcome our future computer assistants...

…but they’re going to have to deal with the fact that my wife and I commonly have exchanges like this: Me: can you hand me the thingy from the thing? Courtney: this one? Me: which …

Computers are coming for more jobs than we think

A great video explainer on how computers and creative destruction are different this time. Why Automation is Different this Time. Hint: we need better ideas than individualism, …

OAuth2 🔥-takes

Is it too late to do hottakes for something that’s been around for nearly a decade? OAuth2 pros: I can allow other sites to use my data with some confidence that, at least, my …

The emotional rollercoaster of extracting code

There’s a moment of despair when extracting functionality from a larger library, framework, or program. The idea grows, a seed at first and then a full-blown tree, that the …

What I talk about when I talk about cars

Human design: what went into deciding how a human-facing thing is made? How did they decide to put the infotainment screen there? Why are BMW dashboard lights orange-ish? Who …

More ideas for framework people

A few months ago I wrote about Framework and Library people. I had great follow-up conversations with Ben Hamill, Brad Fults, and Nathan Ladd about it. Some ideas from those …

Did you try editing the right file?

The first few years of my career, I edited the wrong file all the time. I could spend hours making changes, wondering why nothing was happening, until I realized I’d been tinkering …

Chaining Ruby enumerators

I want to connect two Ruby enumerators. Give me all the values from the first, then the second, and so on. Ideally, without forcing any lazy evaluations and flat so I don’t have to …

When my brain storms

I do my best thinking: In the shower. I love to take long showers, and I love my tankless water heater. While talking. Something about my brain is wired directly to my mouth. When …

Stored Procedure Modern

The idea behind Facebook’s Relay is to write declarative queries, put them next to the user interaction code that uses them, and compose those queries. It’s a solid idea. But this …

We should get back to inventing jetpacks

I don’t like using services like Uber, Twitch, or Favor. I want to like them, because the underlying ideas are pretty futuristic. But the reality of these services is that the new …

Feedback: timing is everything

With feedback, like jokes, timing is everything. Good feedback at a bad time won’t do the trick. I’ve mostly experienced programming feedback through pull requests. This is way …

Practically applying Clojure

Fourteen Months with Clojure. Dan McKinley on using Clojure to build AWS automation platform Skyliner: The tricky part isn’t the language so much as it is the slang. Also, the best …

Lessons on software complexity from MS Office

I learned a lot of things from Complexity and Strategy by Terry Crowley: In Fred Brooks’ terms, this was essential complexity, not accidental complexity. Features interact — …

Healthcare is a multiplier, not a consumer good

Adam Davidson tells a personal story about a relative who, with health care, could’ve continued his career. Without that healthcare, he ended up addicted and in jail. What the GOP …

Type tinkering

I’m playing with typeful language stuff. Having only done a pinch of Haskell, Scala, and Go tinkering amidst Ruby work over the past ten years, it’s jarring. But, things are much …

Let’s price externalities, America

Hello, America. We have to talk. You are built on top of a mountain of federal (a trillion or so dollars) debt. That debt covers some things we need (roads, health care, social …

Personal city guides

I’ve seen lots of sites about how to use software. The Setup and The Sweet Setup are my favorites. You can find lots of sites about how to use ideas like Inbox Zero or Crossfit. …

Universes from which to source test names

A silly bit of friction in writing good tests is coming up with consistent, distinctive names for the models or object you may create. Libraries that generate fake names, like …

You should practice preparatory refactoring

When your project reaches midlife and tasks start taking noticeably longer, that’s the time to refactor. Not to radically decouple your software or erect onerous boundaries. …

Sometimes it's okay to interrupt a programmer

I try really hard to avoid interrupting people. Golden rule: if I don’t want interruptions I shouldn’t impose them on other, right? Not entirely so. Having teammates around, and …

Let's not refer to Ruby classes by string

I am basically OK with the tradeoffs involved in using autoloading in Rails. I do, however, rankle a little bit at this bit of advice in the Rails guide to developing engines. …

They're okay political opinions

The downside to the Republicans proposing a healthcare bill is that it’s a major legislative disappointment, given they’ve spent seven years symbolically opposing healthcare. The …

A little PeopleMover 💌

I love the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover. It’s what a transportation system should be. [caption id=“attachment_4190” align=“alignnone” width=“500”] People Mover …

Your product manager could save your day

I thought the feature I’m working on was sunk. An API we integrate with is, let us say kindly, Very Much Not Great. Other vendors provide an API where we can request All The Things …

Three Nice Qualities

One of my friends has been working on a sort of community software for several years now. Uniquely, this software, Uncommon, is designed to avoid invading and obstructing your …

I have become an accomplished typist

Over the years, many hours in front of a computer have afforded me the gift of keyboarding skills. I’ve put in the Gladwellian ten thousand hours of work and it’s really paid off. …

The occurrence and challenge of ActiveRecord lookup tables

I’ve noticed lots of Rails apps end up with database-backed lookup tables. Particularly in systems with some kind of customer or subscription management, it’s almost guaranteed …

The annoying browser boundaries

Since I started writing web applications in around 1999, there’s been an ever-present boundary around what you can do in a browser. As browsers have improved, we have a new line in …

Just tackle the problem

There’s a moment when a programming problem engulfs me. Perhaps it’s exciting and intriguing, maybe it’s weird and infuriating, maybe it’s close to a deadline and stressing me out. …

What is the future of loving cars?

To me, a great car is equal part shape, technology, sound, and history. It seems like the future of cars is all technology at the expertise of all other factors. What will it mean …

Levels of musical genius

I often think about what kind of unique musical talent some performer I enjoy possesses. A few examples: J-Dilla was at the center of many groups doing amazing things creating an …

Four parks, one day

In January, Courtney and I went to Disney World for her birthday. We bought an annual pass last year, so we’ve literally been a few times over the past year. This time ‘round, …

Protect the beginner's mind

Someone joins your team. They have a beginner’s mind about your project and culture. Take a person with beginner’s mind, tell them about how things have always been, how they got …

The right way and the practical way

Brent Simmons, Reason Number 33,483 to Hate Programming: Or I could have the superclass expose the appIsTerminating property in its header file, so that the subclass could see it. …

Contrast NYC and SF

Dallas and Austin are the cities I’ve spent my life in. I’ve spent maybe three weeks of my life, total, in San Francisco and New York City. They’re similar in that SF and NYC are …

Framework and Library people

By unscientific survey, I think many developers would prefer to work in a “framework world” where many decisions of principle and organization are passed down by a vendor or …

Execution and idea in Frontierland

It’s commonly held, and pretty much true, that ideas are shallow and execution is depth. That is, the former is nothing without lots and lots of the latter. Let’s set aside how …

Empathy Required

Nearly fourteen years ago, I graduated college and found my first full-time, non-apprentice-y job writing code. When I wrote code, these were the sorts of things I worried about: …

Copypasta, you're the worst pasta

Copypasta. It’s the worst. “I need something like this code here, I’ll just drop it over there where I need it. Maybe change a few things.” Only you can prevent headdesks! It’s not …

Through mocks and back

A problem with double/stub/mock libraries is that they don’t often fail in a total manner. They don’t snap like a pencil when they’re used improperly. Instead, when you use them …

Stevie Wonder, for our times of need

Tim Carmody writing for Kottke.org, Stevie Wonder and the radical politics of love: Songs in the Key of Life tries to reconcile the reality of the post-Nixon era — the pain that …

How Disney pulls me in

Dave Rupert, Disneyland and the Character Machine: In October my family took a trip to Disneyland. I couldn’t help but be infected by the magic of Disneyland that allows you to …

Does an unadvertised extension point even exist?

There was an extension point, but I missed it. I was adding functionality to a class. I needed to add something that seemed a little different, but not too far afield, from what …

Our laws are here, they just aren't equally practiced yet

That thing where institutions like the FBI are prohibited by law from meddling with presidential elections, and then the FBI meddled multiple times. We’re just going to let that …

Journalism for people, not power

Journalism is trying very hard to do better, but still failing America. Media is covering politics and not “We, the people”. Take the coverage of the Republican attempt to neuter …

I love overproduced music

It seems like some folks don’t like music with a lot of studio work. Overproduced, they call it. Maybe this is a relic of the days when producers weren’t a creative force on par …

Turns out Ruby is great for scripting!

Earlier last year, I gave myself two challenges: write automation scripts in Ruby (instead of giving up on writing them in shell) use system debugging tools (strace, lsof, gdb, …

Tinkers are a quantity game, not a quality game

I spend too much time fretting about what to build my side projects and tinkers with. On the one hand, that’s because side projects and tinkers are precisely for playing with …

Jobs, not adventures

Earlier this year, after working at LivingSocial for four years, I switched things up and started at ShippingEasy. I didn’t make much of it at the time. I feel like too much is …

Fascinating mechanical stories

I already wrote about cars as appliances or objects, but I found this earlier germ of the idea in my drafts: There’s an in-betweenish bracket where prestige, social signaling, or …

The lesser known vapors and waves

There’s a thing going on in music with all the vapors and chills and waves. I’m not entirely sure what it is, yet. Even after reading this excellent survey of the various vaporwave …

Connective blogging tissue, then and now

I miss the blogging scene circa 2001-2006. This was an era of near-peak enthusiasm for me. One of those moments where a random rock was turned over and what lay underneath was …

On recent Mercedes-Benz dashboard designs

Mercedes (is it ok if I call you MB?), I think we need to talk. You’re doing great in Formula 1, congratulations on that! That said, you’ve gone in a weird direction with your …

Mutual Benefit

Leaders of business and thought have been putting out statements showing unity or acceptance of Donald Trump’s election. I feel this is normalizing what has just happened to this …

The least bad solution

Sometimes I look over the options and constraints to choose something suboptimal. I have to pick the least-bad solution. I recently chose a least-bad way to write a test. In a …

Wanted: state machines in the language

Our programming languages are often structured around the problem domain of compilers and the archaic (for most of us) task of converting things people understand to a thing the …

Van Halen ranked, atypically

Best songs that David Lee Roth talks over: "Hot for Teacher" "Panama" "Everybody Wants Some" Coincidentally, best use of Van Halen songs in film: "Hot for Teacher" in the strip …

Bon Iver discovers the Option key on his Mac

[caption id=“attachment_3815” align=“alignnone” width=“213”] Someone just discovered all the weird glyphs you can make if you hold the option key and type random stuff![/caption] …

On the albums of The Clash

Passing thoughts on the discography of The Clash that is not London Calling: Brian and I had a conversation that randomly veered onto the Clash which prompted to me to listen to …

We’re all adults here, but we’re not all mind readers

My favorite advice on the topic of method visibility (i.e. public vs. private) comes from Python creator Guido van Rossum. It goes something like “we’re all adults here” and says …

Automotive enthusiasm and pragmatism

A few years ago, I was re-infected with enthusiasm for cars. I came upon One Car to Do It All and found a new reason to obsess over cars. I read Car and Driver and Road and Track …

Here comes GraphQL

GraphQL is gaining purchase outside of the JavaScript communities and this seems like a pretty good thing. Shopify and GitHub have jumped on board. Absinthe (Elixir) and …

Weaponized jerks

For a long time, the Central Intelligence Agency has had a guide to wrecking an organization by doing a few weird tricks at meetings. It recently came to light, and took hold as a …

Refactor the cow paths

Ron Jeffries, Refactoring – Not on the backlog! Simples! We take the next feature that we are asked to build, and instead of detouring around all the weeds and bushes, we take the …

Losing the scent, acquiring the taste

When I didn’t drink coffee, the thing I enjoyed about coffee was the smell. It has a really great aroma. Unlike popcorn! Now that I do drink coffee, I don’t notice the smell as …

Getting around, together

Riding the Rails: Celebrating Trains and Subway Commuter Life: Train time is essential time, and rail travel isn’t strictly pragmatic. For many, the commute is their only time to …

A bold, future-retro Audi dash

I’m officially intrigued by the Audi TT and R8 going with no center display. The look is retro and functional. Will it annoy passengers, or do passengers who want to change the …

Our current political Trolley Problem

As self-driving cars inch closer to a daily reality, the Trolley Problem seems to have entered our lexicon. In short, should a self-driving computer choose to avoid hitting a bunch …

A few qualities of mature developers

What is technical leadership? Per Mature Developers, it's a lot of things. My favorites: So one of the first and most important qualities of mature developers is they’re more often …

I love when snares don't keep time

In the majority of music you’ll hear after 1960, the drummer does most of the time keeping with their snare. On 100% of Bruce Springsteen songs, time is kept entirely with the …

We should make jokes about tech millionaires

I try not to respond to the bullshit in this world with “this person is awful and they should feel awful”. Except for politicians. I try not to participate in witch hunts. I cope …

Why I blog in bursts

I write here in bursts. It confounds me as to what marks the beginning and end of those spikes. I have a few hunches: ambitions grow larger than my free time: it’s easier to hit …

Extra Ruby chaining, not that costly

A few folks suggested I try lazy enumerables to make my extremely chained style practical. I was curious about the actual costs of my style, so it’s time for lies and …

One idea per line

Lately, I’m doing a weird thing when writing Ruby code. I’m trying to only put one idea or action per line. I’m not sure about it yet. Here’s what a method to fetch item-y things …

Less fancy

Programming is easier when you know how to stop solving 100 problems with 1 fancy thing and solve 100 problems with 20 plain things.

How does a bomber outlast a JS library?

Ember is probably leading the JavaScript framework pack by supporting releases with security patches for slight more than a year. By comparison, there’s a cottage industry of …

Code that resists

Kellan Elliott-McCrea, on the way towards an understanding of technical debt, catalogs the ways we end up with code that resists our efforts to change it: Therefore the second …

Tinkering with Kinto

Here’s a thing I want to experiment with. Short videos talking about what I’m currently tinkering with. Here’s one! [wpvideo lj3gGXFS] More notes in the repo, if you want to play …

Three part method

I find methods/functions decomposed into three parts really satisfying. Consider a typical xUnit test: def test_grants_new_role # setup user = make_user new_role = make_new_role # …

My favorite beef is O'Reilly vs. Graham

Of all the pop culture beefs going on at the time of this writing (Meek vs. Drake, BoB vs. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Trump vs. Everyone), my favorite is now Tim O’Reilly vs. Paul Graham …

Threaded discussions: nope nope nope

Pet peeve #73: threaded discussions. You may have seen it in a Usenet reader or perhaps even your email. It may seem like a great way to manage a long conversation with multiple …

The future of programming is design, teaching, and empathy

The Future Programming Manifesto starts with this header: Inessential complexity is the root of all evil OK, I’m on board! We should measure complexity as the cumulative cognitive …

BDFLs aren't community builders

What if large open source projects appointed a community manager to handle things like codes of conduct and social spaces? Anecdotally, those who make large projects are often the …

One model doesn't fit all

There are two kinds of developers in the world: those who realize data models aren’t monolithic and use business boundaries to their advantage those struggling with monolithic data …

Versioning an API is a river delta of pain

Slight rant: versioning a (REST) API inflicts upon you a confluence of factors that will lead to pain no matter what you do. You’re going to need to version things, which opens you …

I am a unique snowflake

Every software person is as special and unique as they think they are. But things go weird, in my experience, when I try to express my snowflakeness in production code. If I want …

Rails doctrine and Kremlinology

Long story short, Rails now has a nicely written Doctrine that delineates the principles that motivate tradeoffs the framework makes. Any Rails developer can benefit from …

Software design, always on the wrong foot

Software design has probably been broken from the start. The earliest business software, machine language encoded to punch cards, was more about fiddling registers and managing …

Specific, purposeful emails are great

When I’m emailing with teammates, I try to do them a few favors. I make my purpose clear, specific, and up front. I often write the whole email, figure out the real purpose, and …

Easy steps to programming language commitment

Feel pressured by other developers telling you that your programming language of choice is old, bad, or that you should feel bad? Apply this heuristic: Try different programming …

Code needs boundaries, but not too many

Let’s talk about boundaries in programs. I need them, otherwise programs grow increasingly inscrutable and impossible to change. A lack of boundaries is nearly as bad as spaghetti …

That's a question

In a technical conversation, I love to hear this: “that’s a good question!” Now we are going to talk about something we might have otherwise missed. Later we will look back at a …

Life's Easy Mode

This morning I walked a half mile, not too far, to a neighborhood coffee shop. I had two breakfast tacos and a sweet-flavored latte. I can choose to walk, and take a Sunday morning …

Doubt mongering

Doubt mongering. It’s a thing that happens because egos are fragile. Some doubts I’ve heard or uttered myself in the past month: That sounds like building a dependency manager, and …

NASA: robots everywhere! Military: nuke the moon!

NASA (2014 funding: $17 billion) has sent man to the moon and robots all over the solar system. The military (2015 funding: unfathomable) wanted to nuke the moon. Maybe we could …

What about event sourcing?

I was chatting about Event Sourced data models with a pal last week. He is really taken by the idea and excited that perhaps its a “next big thing” in data modeling. Regretfully, I …

Encapsulation is a tradeoff too

Better understand Encapsulation. I can’t 😍 this article enough: An individual programmer has fixed limits on how quickly they can build up instructions and later on how quickly …

Bridging design and development with data

Programming and designing with Pure UI: The process involved, among other things, creating a new UI, ditching the dependency on Flash in favor of HTML5 and introducing new …

Microservices in context

An interview with John Allspaw, on Etsy infrastructure and operations: For example, a good friend of mine runs and has run an electronic trading exchange. You could imagine his …

When we model

I’ve observed a few levels of modeling (i.e. thinking about a problem and describing it in concepts plus data structures) that software developers do in the wild: structural …

Word processors, still imitating typewriters

Right after we finish ridding the world of “floppy-disk-to-save” icons, I propose we remove this bit of obtuse skeumorphism from the default view in word processors like Google …

Ideas for Twittering better

When it comes to Twitter, things can get out of hand fast. Setting aside the hostile environment some people face when they participate in Twitter (which is setting aside a …

"Everybody Wants to Rule the World", too much of its time

I really dislike “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears because it’s a perfectly written song that sounds exactly like the year it was recorded, 1985. Five years …

Hype curve superpositions

It seems, these days, that technologies can exist in multiple phases of the hype curve, simultaneously. Two data points I read this weekend: Node, which I personally place …

Raising all boats

It’s easy to complain about PHP. For instance, why didn’t they choose ☃ as their namespace resolution operator?! As a developer with lofty opinions, I’m not a big fan of PHP. To …

Functions about nothing

The tricky thing about decomposing code into abstractions is you end up with “functions about nothing”. You’ve probably seen on of these: a method or function with really vague …

Missing the big picture for the iterations

I. Driving in Italy is totally unlike driving in America. For one thing, there are very often no lane markers. Occasionally a 1.5 lane road is shared by two cars moving in opposite …

Aliens through the eyes of boys

On screening Aliens for a slumber party of 11 year old boys: "I like the way this looks," one said. "It's futuristic but it's old school. It's almost steampunk." "This is like Team …

It's not your fault if your tools confuse you

I. Pet Peeve #43: Complaining About Frameworks The whole point of a framework is that you trade one or more axes of freedom in how you structure your program so that you can move …

Organize your Gemfile by function and coupling

Most Gemfiles I see are either unordered (just throw new gems in, wherever!) or alphabetically ordered. A while back, I reordered the Sifter Gemfile, ordering by difficulty of …

Programming advice for a younger me

How to get better at programming without even programming: Accept, in your heart and mind, that the languages, libraries, and tools that you use to write programs may not be good …

Leadership, pick a size

Like fast food or coffee at Starbucks, maybe team leadership comes in three sizes. Extra large leadership. “This is what you’re doing. Make it happen, let me know when it’s done.” …

Pick one novelty per project

My pal Brandon Hays and I are fond of noting that projects have a very limited tolerance for the risk of picking a novel technology or approach. Thus, they should intentionally …

Teach people to magnify their mind, not write code

Coding is not the new literacy: When we say that coding is the new literacy, we're arguing that wielding a pencil and paper is the old one. Coding, like writing, is a mechanical …

When software loses its hair

Software’s Receding Hairline: This is interesting, because the mechanism of growing a comb-over applies to software development. A comb-over is the accumulation of years of …

New Pro Bowl selection explainer

Pro Bowl rosters selected by Michael Irvin and Cris Carter: Last year, the NFL did away with the AFC vs. NFC format and began using "captains" to oversee a fantasy draft to fill …

Sometimes

Sometimes you go on a writing slump. Usually, just throwing something at the wall is how you undo that. Sometimes you notice that a lot of your writing can end up in platitudes and …

18 months is a smelly interval

18 months is a dangerous window, when it comes to building a product. It’s far enough in the future that it seems like you could deliver an ambitious idea within a year and a half. …

Dining at the source code buffet

Let me start with a quote from wonderful person James Edward Gray II: One of my favorite techniques for really learning a new language is to read the core API like a good novel. …

Megaprojects: megacool

Megaproject. It’s a cool word. It’s an even cooler list-of-pages on Wikipedia. I’ve only worked on projects limited to tens or dozens of people. The human and geographical scale of …

Is SNL trending up?

Has SNL been getting worse? Viewer ratings say, nope. If anything, it’s becoming more consistent and slightly better. Previously: how to understand SNL. Always: nostalgia bias. …

Sam Stephenson, understated and excellent

I’ve enjoyed Sam Stephenson’s work for a long time. Even before “sheesh”, the most polite dismantling of an over-privileged open source user, Sam’s work has been top notch. …

Vacation, disposable, and calm computing

1 Let me talk about vacation computing. The prime directive of vacation computing is that you should compute on vacation as little as possible. Neglect your email, abandon your …

Apple, Disney, and obsession

People in technology disproportionately like to comment on Apple’s products and business. Outside of technology, there are just as many folks who love to obsess over Disney’s theme …

Multiplication over management

When a developer becomes a manager, It’s not a promotion, it’s a career change: If you want to do your leadership job effectively, you will be exercising a vastly different set of …

How to succeed at Rails by trying

I think most teams, probably 90% of them, should start and stick with Rails conventions. Intelligently apply design principles, watch out for coupling that’s not worthwhile, …

The wolf moves fast...

The Wolf: The Wolf moves fast because he or she is able to avoid the encumbering necessities of a group of people building at scale. This avoidance of most things process related …

How waterparks became a thing

The Men Who Built the Great American Waterpark, a roaring tale about the fellows who created the notion of a park for water attractions, from Wet and Wild to my personal favorite …

Well-tuned judgement

Lessons From A Lifetime Of Being A Programmer: Never stop learning, the technology steamroller is right behind you waiting for you to stop. I’ve taken this one seriously in the …

Commercialeering

Things you might hear in commercials/promotions for software and beer: “The first 96-calorie Pilsner” “Invented the smooth-pour top” “Next-generation build system” “The database …

Sportsball Deciphered (II)

It’s Thursday. Sadly enough, this year, that means there’s football on. We’re far from peak football, but it’s getting closer. Prepare yourself, and tell your kids of the days when …

Vegas, America/Starbuck's playground

I’m going to Vegas this weekend with my wife on a real vacation where we’re going to do as little as possible. Not run around Disney World all day, not drive up and down the …

Put. The phone. Down.

Nick Quaranto has Too many streams: There’s just too many things to pay attention to. I get questioned pretty frequently about this: how do you pay attention to nearly 1,500 people …

Conservation of complexity

You can’t fight the Law of conservation of complexity: The law of conservation of complexity in human–computer interaction states that every application has an inherent amount of …

Executables deciphered

What's inside a compiled Hello, World program? Julia Evans is on that. How to read an executable: Executable file formats are regular file formats that you can understand. I’ll …

Sportsball deciphered

It’s September and football season is upon us. Thus, I will soon annoy the snot out of people who say “sportsball” and generally ignore sports. Some will be able to mute me on …

Make systems from goals

Use systems to get where you’re going, not goals: My problem with goals is that they are limiting. Granted, if you focus on one particular goal, your odds of achieving it are …

Microservices for grumpy old men and women

Microservices? I’m not entirely sure what they are. The term seems to exist on all parts of the hype cycle simultaneously. It’s on the ascent of excitement, the descent of …

Jerry Jones: slightly human, mostly Faustian

The best thing you will read about Jerry Jones this year. Slightly humanizing, even. What Jerry Jones wants, he cannot have: I’ve never wanted anything as much as I want to win the …

Thought + Quality

Oliver Reichenstein, Putting Thought Into Things: Quality — as in “fitness for purpose” — lives in the structure of a product. A lack of quality is a lack of structure, and a lack …

When Developers Design

I see lots of “should designers code?” articles and introductions to coding for designers. I see far less interest in the converse. So what’s a designer think? Cap Watkins, a …

How Rails fits into the front-end

Is Rails well positioned for where the web (on all devices) is going? Pal Dave Copeland asked that on Twitter. Turns out I had plenty of opinions! I buy into the notion that the …

A Ruby hash, Luxury Touring Edition

map.rb, quality software by Ara T. Howard: the awesome ruby container you've always wanted: a string/symbol indifferent ordered hash that works in all rubies m = Map.new m[:a] = 0 …

It's Always Been This Way...Huh?

I’ve been programming, as a full-time job, for more than ten years. I started doing Ruby, and Rails, nearly ten years ago. I’ve been at LivingSocial for a two and a half years now. …

Microsoft's Orleans, a good ideas

I came up in the days when Microsoft and Linux were mortal enemies. Back when “Borg Bill Gates” was the icon for stories about MS on Slashdot. Back when Slashdot was the cutting …

Unpacking RailsConf 2014

RailsConf 2014 having wrapped up a few weeks ago, now seems like a good time to try and unpack what I saw, heard, and talked to others about. Bear in mind I skipped RailsConf 2013 …

A chunk of paper

So I’m in rehearsals for a comedic musical. I love comedy. I’m very “meh” about musicals; I don’t know much about them. I like combining familiar and strange things, so it’s great …

Businesses can empathy too

Building an Ethical Business: Empathy is sometimes described as a personal trait, but it’s a skill, a skill that can be learned, that can be honed, and that can be instilled as a …

About version numbers

Conjecture: thinking about releasing software versions to users/partners/the public in dotted version numbers, e.g. “1.0, 2.1, 5.3” is a symptom of misshaped thinking. This line of …

English-like programming languages, like, yuck

Glenn Vanderburg on teaching developer how to use Ruby testing APIs: For example: I hate it when APIs (or languages, or whatever) are presented as "it's just English!" That doesn't …

Pancake publishing

I’m currently jazzed by the idea of full stack writing: Hi is what we call a “full stack” writing and publishing platform. Just what is a writing stack? Capture. Write. Publish. is …

Find your principles for editing programs

Some folks from GitHub sprung the Atom text editor on the internet yesterday. Releasing a product into a market defined by saturation, settling for brokenness, and zero-cost …

Counterpoint: Rails and instance variables

A great thing about writing is that it focuses and sharpens one’s thoughts. The great thing about writing in public is that your thoughts, when passed through the brains of others, …

A tale of two Rails views

Why do I prefer to avoid referencing instance variables in view? I needed to clarify this personal principle to a teammate recently. It was one of those things I’ve internalized so …

Rockets and startups

A venture-funded startup is sort of like a space program. Space programs don’t build airplanes that fly in flat, predictable, safe trajectories. They shouldn’t be concerned with …

Grow and cultivate

Adding new functionality to software is really exciting. I love poking around the edges of a system, figuring out what’s going on, and looking for that “obvious” place where the …

Currently provoking my thought

The worst NFL announcers, by the numbers (via Kottke). Obviously, this is my jam. To my surprise, Phil Simms didn’t come in last. Simms is a real conundrum; I think he’s great on …

Stop me if you've heard this one

Lately, I find myself stopping to make sure I haven’t previously written the thing I’m currently writing. For starters, I have a horrible method for moving things out of my “I …

The joy of finishing

Then, the finish. Stain. Wipe. Wait. Stain. Wipe. Wait. Sand. Wipe. Stain. Wipe. Wait. Check. Seal. Wait. Sand. Wipe. Seal. Wait. Sand. Seal. Wait. And that's if everything goes …

Let the right something in

There will always be more somethings we want to do than we have time to do. Right? Maybe. A lot of the right somethings can add up to a great thing, even if the somethings aren't …

Not that kind of log

First, read all of this excellent distillation of distributed systems by Jay Kreps, The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data’s unifying abstraction. …

Dear Sync Diary

Brent Simmons is keeping a diary as he works through implementing sync for Vesper, an iOS note-taking app. Building this sort of thing isn’t easy; cf. it took Cultured Code …

Tony Romo media circuses over the years

2011: should not have thrown that pass 2012: should not have allowed that pass to be tipped and intercepted 2013: should not have allowed his back to become herniated 2014: should …

This is how you chalkboard

vimeo.com/82253916 By pal Brandon Keepers, who I had no idea had that kind of talent. Well done!

Toot a horn while you test

Someone make me a thing that plays horn samples as my test suite runs. Every time a test or assertion finishes, toot the horn sample. A fast suite would sound like Phil Spector’s …

Give me all your Blackbird stories

The Blackbird had outrun nearly 4,000 missiles, not once taking a scratch from enemy fire. Apparently its sister plane, the A-12, was not so lucky. I will always be a sucker for …

Team superpowers: invest early, reap often

Startup Engineering Team Super Powers. You want all of these. Well-considered investments in tooling and conventions can pay out handsomely, and daily, if you put it in place …

Aliens ate my program's state

So, Adam from a few years ago, you think you can build a distributed system? Designing a concurrent system, one that runs across multiple processors using shared memory threads, is …

NSHipster rainbow bar

My favorite design touch in the Gowalla apps was the rainbow bar. Small wonder that fellow Gowalla alumni Mattt Thompson included one on the landing page for his collection of …

Database rivalry in the Valley

A couple years ago, Google released an embeddedable key-value database called LevelDB. There was much rejoicing. Recently, Facebook released their fork of LevelDB, RocksDB. There’s …

The false bad guy

A pet peeve, in writing and thinking: introducing a false antagonist to create tension in a story. This is rampant in tech writing. Apple vs. Google, Ive vs. Forestall, Rails vs. …

Object-oriented relativism

When a Method Can Do Nothing, Michael Feathers: If polymorphism means anything at all, it means that the object is in charge. We send it a message and it is up to it to decide what …

Designing technological empowerment

Applied Discovery: What future are we building, given that we play a role in such an important process? On the role designers play, what they do as careers progress, and how design …

Friday at a Mexican restaurant

Could be any Mexican restaurant. Could be any Friday. This one seemed special to me.

Currently intriguing me

A channel, a sewer, Alabama, and a sunset walk into a bar: A Lua implementation of Go-style coroutines and channels, inspired by a channel implementation by Russ Cox, who is a …

Breakfast cannot wait, Prince

rd.io/x/QFWiK0E… Look, Prince, I’m not sure if I can agree with you regarding “Breakfast Can Wait”. Cereal? Toast? English Muffins? Sure, those things can wait. Migas? Pancakes? …

A path through Enumerable

In Cocoa, you can poke inside object graphs (and more!) using dotted strings: NSDictionary *bestOfBeatles = @{@"paul": @{@"beatles": @"Hey Jude", @"solo": @"Jet"}}; NSString *solo …

Football rules: not hard, even for the defense

The NFL is going through an awkward transition from laissez-faire bloodsport to something…less bloodsport-y. Players-turned analysts often rush to the side of the “victimized” …

Let me help you, computer DJ

I look forward to the day when machine learning can differentiate between “don’t play this song because it is awful” from “ don’t play this song because I’ve heard this it a …

Quit your desk

Things I’ve quit doing at my desk: Many writers maintain a private writing hut. The hut has one purpose: it’s the place they go to write. They don’t do anything else there. Once …

It's all made of maths

Math: humans mostly have a love/hate relationship with it. And yet, even if you’re challenged by the continuous maths like myself, it’s hard to argue that there isn’t something …

Coffee and other warmups

Making a cup of coffee sometimes helps me prepare for the process of solving puzzles with computers. Something about choosing AeroPress, French press, Chemex, or Clever; heating …

Off my grid

Courtney regularly drives an hour southwest of Austin, past Dripping Springs, to practice dog agility at a barn her friend rents. It's amazingly quiet once you get past the city, …

Reads for your weekends

That what I’ve read today and greatly enjoyed: 1491, on rethinking what America looked like before Europeans arrived. Has a delightful sci-fi twist: large parts of the Amazon …

Ignorance: pros and cons

We can often, but not always, choose to ignore those on the internet, on TV, and in our lives with different ideas, philosophies, or opinions about the world. Whether intentional …

Peyton Manning, boringly awesome or awesomely boring?

The best thing you’ll read about football today. Peyton Manning is what happens when a guy with the attention to detail of an accountant is also proficient at throwing a football …

Draw your software

Better Code Design through Pictures: Looking at a picture like this reveals so much that is missing when only looking at Emacs or Vim. Classes that violate the Single …

Happy Birthday, Mr. The Boss!

How to celebrate the 64th birthday of Bruce Springsteen, “The Boss”, if you’re new to this curious American phenomenon: If you’re totally new to his music, start with Born to Run; …

Find the classes lurking in your ActiveRecord models

This advice is going on a year old, but it’s still some of the best around. If you’ve got ungainly ActiveRecord objects that are doing way more than abstracting your data model, …

Developers are weird with words

Naming things is hard. Witness things that developers have named and then struggle to explain because words and people are weird: TDD sounds like it's about testing, but it's …

Twice the podcast listening

I like to listen to podcasts and screencasts at two or three times the recorded speed. The application I use (Instacast) does this with pitch correction, a feature that’s probably …

On music, mostly

You know how sometimes, everything is clicking and you've just got it? Some people call it flow. On Thursday, I was in a quiping flow. You may have witnessed it on Twitter. I …

20% of programming is duh

Sometimes I think 20% of programming is staring at a problem for thirty minutes and thinking there must be a really simple solution right in front of me and then, eureka and then, …

Oh, the complexities you'll know

Carried complexity is the bane of your application. When you add something to software, you incur the cost of doing the work plus the risk that the change will break something in …

Confidence despite evolving systems

Facing risk by instrumenting the hell out of it: Software development is a complex system existing as it does at the intersection of people, systems, good intentions, confused and …

Problems as ever-changing mazes

Problems, puzzles, startups as dynamic mazes: just running to the entrance of (say) the “movies/music/filesharing/P2P” maze or the “photosharing” maze without any sense for the …

Refactor for value over cleanliness

Practice Responsible Refactoring: When cleaning up the code enables you to work faster for a task you aren’t dreaming up but actually have at hand, refactoring is the way to go. …

Finishing software ain't easy

When I start work on a project, whether for personal or professional purposes, I have a sense that I need to devote myself to it. That I should figure out how to make it the best …

Improv perspectives on changing code

In the last improv class I took, we spent a lot of time focusing on four kinds of scenes that appear in improv with astonishing frequency: Straight/absurd: A character has a …

The simple problem inside the complex one

A sophisticated solution to a complex problem is fun to find. Its even fun when someone else finds the solution and thoroughly writes it down. Despite the thrill of recognition for …

Technology that's not a startup

Here’s a nice story on technology that isn’t startups: Unhappy truckers and other algorithmic problems. Logistic networks are a technology, just like smartphones. They make our …

I don't have time to not teach

It wasn’t long ago that other developers not knowing the things I know was really frustrating. “How could they not know this?!” I thought that I didn’t have time nor should I be …

Overtime means your business is hurting

Overtime is Morphine, Ernie Miller: A developer who is truly concerned about the health of his or her company also must be careful to ensure the "patient" isn't developing an …

Scala and Clojure in terms of city building

The Scala folks are building newer, better cities on top of older cities, which is how things really work (e.g. Paris, Rome, Boston, etc.). The Clojure folks are building Dyson …

Tools for software in the large

When software becomes successful, software often becomes large. More features, more support systems, more infrastructure, more people, etc. Therefore, software “in the large” seems …

Less beautiful code, more code that works in production

Developers should care and feed for their systems, especially when they’re in production. Alerting, logging, and metrics are the tools you need. Further, you need to use actual …

Uncertainty, feedback, confidence, a happy ending

Yesterday, I wanted to setup a quick feedback loop for writing some production code. But, I wasn’t entirely sure what that code should look like. Further, I hadn’t worked in the …

Use what you got

How Shopify scales Rails was one of my favorite talks at Big Ruby. Therein, John Duff talks through what Shopify’s Rails stack looks like and why it works for them. What impressed …

When I complain instead of solve

Pet peeve 74: whenever I slip and focus on complaining about who and what instead of thinking about how and why to solve the problem. This is doubly frustrating because I enjoy …

My Rite of Spring overfloweth

Today’s the hundredth anniversary of premier of hometown favorite Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The National Public Radios are all over this. NPR Music and WQXR are collecting …

Entropy and anti-entropy on your codebase

Entropy and Evolution of a Codebase goes well with Your Application is on Fire: If you imagine the modules in a codebase like cells in a Game of Life automaton, you could see cells …

Sandi's Rules

One day, Sandi Metz was pressed by a team she was working with to produce a simple set of rules that would lead to better code quality. After consideration, she came up with the …

Your application is on fire

Six easy pieces on thinking about sustainable code Your application is on fire. Something is consuming it, a process converting fresh and shiny code into rigid, opaque legacy code. …

What makes longevity?

A joke for a late-night variety show monologue may only be funny for one day (e.g. a joke about a celebrity). A newspaper article may lose relevance in days or weeks. A TV show …

The downsides of live music

I am a giant music nerd. I listen to a ton of music, I think about music a lot, and I often seek out new music via Twitter and Rdio (🪦RIP). Besides a dislike for showtunes and …

Learning from a dropped refactoring

You don’t have to deploy every bit of code you write. In fact, it’s pretty healthy if you throw away some of the code you write before you even think about committing it. Case in …

What I wish I'd known about rewrites

I can’t say enough good things about How to Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity. Having been party to a few projects like this, a lot of this advice rings true …

Look up every once in a while!

Sometimes, I feel conditioned never to look beyond the first ten feet of the earth. Watch where you're going, don't run into things, avoid being eaten by bears. Modern life! I see …

Exemplary documentation: size and purpose

There’s a lot to say about programmer-focused software documentation. It’s more crucial than many developers think, so it is often neglected. Even when its not neglected, it’s …

The Third Shift

In the days of industrial labor, many factories ran three shifts per day. Three eight-hour shifts per day keeps a factory fully utilized and some business major’s spreadsheets …

A newsletter

So I did this thing where I wrote a newsletter. I’m going to do it again. The first iteration of this publication was a bit like a written late-night variety show. I wrote about …

Web design for busy coders

Here it is: I'm somewhere between horribly afraid and way-too-smart to seriously attempt front-end web work. Browsers are not the software whose bugs I am interested in knowing …

The gift and the curse of green-field projects

The "green field" in software is a gift and a curse. On the bright side, you have an opportunity to use the new-shiny. Past wrongs can be righted. You can move quickly, without …

Hypermedia chicken, web browser egg

A lot of the hypermedia philosophy is centered around the idea that API clients should work a lot like web browsers and plain-old Hypertext Markup Language. They should follow …

How to understand Saturday Night Live

Saturday Night Live is a changing thing. It’s not new like it was in the seventies, it’s not a powerhouse like it was in the nineties, it may not be the training camp for NBC …

Context is data to burst your bubbles

Designing with context: Context is a slippery topic that evades attempts to define it too tightly. Some definitions cover just the immediate surroundings of an interaction. But in …

Hyperthreading illustrated

I'm fond of saying hyperthreading is a lie. It's true though; a dual hyperthreaded core is nowhere near as awesome as a four real cores. That's more provocative than useful, so let …

TextMate's beautiful and flawed extension mechanism

This is about how TextMate’s bundle mechanism was brilliant, but subtly flawed. However, to make that point, I need to drag you through a dichotomy of developer tools. Composition …

Austin's startup vibe

It's different from other towns. What's the Difference between Austin and San Francisco?: Austin offers you more options, but greater variety means that, on the whole, Austinite’s …

Senior VP Jean-Luc Picard, of the USS Enterprise (Alpha Quadrant division)

If you’re working from the Jean-Luc Picard book of management, a nice little Twitter account of Picard-esque tips on business and life, we can be friends. Consider: Picard …

SoundCloud, micro-services, and software largeness

From a monolithic Ruby on Rails app to the JVM, how Soundcloud has transitioned to a hybrid approach with Ruby apps intermingling with Scala and Clojure apps. I think some of their …

Those Who Make, by hand

Those Who Make is a series about people who craft. Physical things, by hand, that don’t come out the same every time. I love watching people make things, and I doubly love hearing …

Thoughts on "Being a Senior Engineer"

On Being a Senior Engineer made the rounds late last year. Before I finished reading it, I felt it was pointing me down a path I hadn't realized was there but needed to go down. …

Feynman's mess of jiggling things

Richard Feynman, in the process of explaining rubber bands: [youtube www.youtube.com/watch The world is a dynamic mess of jiggling things, if you look at it right! This …

The Rite of March

INT. OFFICE: A team of enthusiastic young folk rush to get their “game changing” app ready for SXSW. A cacophony of phone calls, typing, and organizing swag. EXT. PATIO: A team of …

The double-tap

I use Alfred because I believe that my computer should be practically unusable to other people who try to use it. My goal is to put the things I use frequently close at hand. …

Computers do what we tell them to, except when we give up

We tell ourselves, “a computer only does what we tell it to.” But, when it comes down to it, if we aren’t getting the result we want out of the computer, we often give in and do …

Twitter's optimizations

Data point: a few of the infrastructure pieces out of Twitter have been implemented in low-level, heavy metal C and they’re optimizing on individual machines instead of …

Stella by Starlight

My latest weekend project, called "Stella by Starlight" after a Charles Mingus recording, was to build an analytics-style dashboard for looking at random metrics and events …

Don't isolate yourself

As a remote developer, it's tempting to create an environment where all you do is focus on churning out the code you're paid to write. Minimal email distractions, no noise, …

Adam’s Law of Redis

No matter how many times you tell everyone to not use KEYS, there remains a non-empty set of people who think they can use KEYS. You can’t use KEYS because it has to look at every …

Thoughts on (Programming) Scala

On a whim, I flew through Programming Scala this weekend. I’ve had the book for a while, and actively tried to read it before. But this time, it stuck. All the ideas in Scala are …

Lessons from premature design

Lessons from Premature Abstractions Illustrated. I’ve run afoul of all three of these: Make sure you have someone on the team or externally available that will keep the critical, …

Semantics/Empathy

People argue about words all the time. In the past two weeks, I've participated and watched as nerds unproductively tried to convince each other that they are incorrectly using the …

Reflecting on Ruby releases

Ruby 1.8 brought us a couple changes that made many kinds of metaprogramming easier, plus a whole bunch of library additions that made Ruby feel more "grown up". Without seeking …

Design for test vs. design for API

How many design considerations are there in an almost trivial method? Let's look at two of them. Consider this code: def publish! self.update_attributes(created_at: Time.now) end …

Declaring coupling

A lot of discussions on software design end up focusing on dependencies and coupling. In short, hell is dependencies and the couplings it produces. It's a tricky problem because …

Intermediate variables, organizing OO, meeting Grinders half way

I work with Dave Copeland at LivingSocial, but not on the same team. Maybe someday I’ll fix that, but for now I learn a lot from his writings. Herein, a few things worth checking …

Smiling rappers

The rap game doesn't have to be all posturing and diss tracks. We need more smiling rappers.

Why I'm down on hypermedia containers

In response to my hypermedia opinions, Mike Kelly said: These two seem to conflict: “In my opinion, abstract container formats aren’t useful.” and “Just use JSON”. People normally …

Hypermedia opinions

Through the Gowalla API, and now the Sifter API, I’ve worked with a couple systems one could reasonably call a hypermedia API. Since smart people are talking about them today, I …

How to Jerry Seinfeld

How Jerry Seinfeld writes a joke: [youtube www.youtube.com/watch Very different from how I approach it. But, I love knowing how much goes into his craft and the degree to which he …

Typing code examples, it's like biking

If you want to learn from a piece of code, you should type it out, instead of just reading it. The value of typing code: Typing code may be like riding a bicycle. I’m surprised how …

A decentralized web is hard

The Web We Lost, on the web of ad-hoc, bottom-up social networks before the pendulum swung fully towards centralized networks like MySpace, then Friendster, and now Facebook, …

Wherein I heart Code Climate

We’ve had Sifter’s repo hooked up to Code Climate for a couple months now and I’m really loving it. Garrett and I have both found it fun to kill duplication or refactor away …

Focus-mode considered harmful

I have, at times, been a practitioner of turning off notifications, superfluous applications, and other distracting computer softwares so I could "get things done". Sometimes it …

Ideas for living and creating differently

Try thinking about living and creating a little differently today. Advice for beginners: push through the shortcomings of your early work until your ability catches up with your …

Hit it, don't quit

How to be good at anything. In short: do it, get feedback, study how to improve, repeat. Something I’ve found, through crossfit, is that if I have any strong suit it’s not …

You can't solve technical debt, you can only hope to contain it

Staring Down Technical Debt: Technical Debt is an interesting phrase. We all have a sense of what it is instinctively, but we rarely want to think about it. If we think about it …

Needs better words

How much easier would Haskell be if its vocabulary wasn’t so deeply rooted in abstract mathematics? How many more people would immediately understand Cassandra if it just adopted …

The qualities of better code

What is 'better' code? Dave Copeland on the qualities readable, changeable code exhibits. Of the attributes he identifies, I think number of paths (ABC complexity) is the most …

Gimme clarity

Wise pal Brain Bailey, along the way to writing about Woody Allen, perfectly articulates my challenge in thinking about how a team should work: The combination of clarity and …

The feel of a commented program

Opening a nicely documented source file is like opening a well-designed, nicely printed book. The main text is obvious, but the side-notes are there to help you when you aren’t …

Some productivity winners

Three things that are making me more productive lately: Pick a thing and do it. Whatever you want to accomplish today, do it immediately after you wake up. No social media, no …

Sit on the fence between abstraction and practice

Theory and Practice is about a fence. It’s tempting to steer all the way towards the abstract, academic side, or all the way towards cutthroat practical side. Some of the most …

Get in my ears, you dissonant chord

Petrushka chord. Two major chords played a half-tone apart. So, it sounds good, except it sounds grating. It's a motif throughout Stravinsky's ballet Petrouchka. Ergo, like …

Dustin Curtis' recipe for doing

Do. Your short, sharp inspirational mantras for the week.

RubyConf 2012 notes

My notes, in a somewhat sketch-esque fashion, from RubyConf 2012. I hope they’re useful and/or amusing to you! [gallery link=“file”]

Pop discovery/rediscovery

Programming is like pop culture in the sense that Blondie gets reinvented every decade and every decade client-server computing is rediscovered. But it’s also like pop culture in …

Marginal pennies and dollars

The give a penny, take a penny jar is a logical conundrum. It is not, on its surface, a rational thing. I have no data, but I suspect very few people who put money into them are …

Ruthlessness and fighting for it

You Are Not Ruthless Enough: Being ruthless to yourself means every time you say “oh, I’ll just open up this internal bit over here…” use that moment to give yourself whatever …

Working with Ruby's GVL

Visualising the Ruby Global VM Lock. A nice commit-by-commit look at how extensions for Ruby 1.9 work with the GVL, what that looks like as tests run, and how to release the GVL to …

A pithy take on development vs. operations

The essential, face-palming difference between too many development teams and too many operations teams is thus: Development: “I know how it works, but I don’t know how to make it …

How Ruby IO is formed

Ruby's IO Buffering And You! Jesse Storimer screencasts his way through what happens when you read and write to files and sockets in Ruby, explaining the behavior and spelunking …

Follow the smells

It’s handy to know a lot about programming langauges, patterns, “best” practices, and anecdotal experience in applying those ideas. But premature application of ideas can lead to …

A handful of useful project mantras

You could do a lot worse than following the heuristics set out by this Software Architecture cheat sheet. The tip I need to follow more often is "Is There Another Way"; I …

Know a little hardware

Consider: Google's intricate and massive data center operations, wherein Google is not only leading the pack in building distributed computing and database infrastructure, but …

A kingdom of concerns

When doing object-oriented programming and following SOLID principles, there is sometimes a concern that classes will proliferate and you end up with a Kingdom of Nouns. I find it …

bitly's nsq has some good ideas

bitly/nsq: NSQ is a realtime message processing system designed to operate at bitly's scale, handling billions of messages per day. It promotes distributed and decentralized …

Invent the right thing

You have to invent the right thing. Some things you might invent: A solution to a problem. Nothing novel, just an answer for a question. Eg. any Rails/Django/etc. application. An …

A better shared space

Remote teams are hard. Not impossible hard, but running uphill hard. It’s hard because people are used to interacting face-to-face. Given the opportunity, they’ll interact with …

I got Clojure stacks

Here’s a Sunday afternoon hack. It’s a “stack” machine implemented in Clojure. I intended for it to be a stack machine, no airquotes, but I got it working and realized what I’d …

Faster, computer program, kill kill!

Making code faster requires insight into the particulars of how computers work. Processor instructions, hardware behavior, data structures, concurrency; it’s a lot of black art. …

When to Sinatra, when to Rails

On Rails, Sinatra, and picking the right tool for the job. Pedro Belo, of Heroku fame, finds Rails is way better for pure-web apps and Sinatra is way better for pure-API apps. Most …

Common sense code checks

Etsy’s Static Analysis for PHP. This isn’t as complicated as you might think. While Facebook’s HipHop is used, and is quite sophisticated, a lot of this is just common sense. …

Designing for Concurrency

A lot is made about how difficult it is to write multi-threaded programs. No doubt, it is harder than writing a CRUD application or your own testing library. On the other hand, …

Cardinal sins

It is conceivable that a really good machine can learn our hash algorithm really well, but in the case of string hashing we still have to walk some memory to give us reasonable …

Three application growth stories

First you grow your application, then you grow your organization, and then you get down to the metal and eek out all the performance you can. Evolution of SoundCloud’s …

My inner dialog while coding

I’m a bit of a sailor when I’m wrangling my own creations.

Hello, you beautiful fixed-width font

Pitch. Not quite a programmer’s font, but holy cow is it gorgeous. I love the thought put into this type; the creator actually tried to recreate the artifacts of type created by …

One part mechanics, one part science

One black-and-white perspective on building software is that part of it is about mechanics and part of it is about science. The mechanics part is about wiring things up, composing …

Know a feedback loop

TDD is one way to create a feedback loop for building your application. Spiking code out and then stabilizing it is another: For most people, TDD is a mechanism for discovery and …

Constructive teamwork is made of empathy

We nerds are trained from an early age to argue on the internet, hone our logical skills, and engage with people based on data instead of empathy. twitter.com/gotascii/… It’s so …

Futures, Features, and the Enterprise-D

A future is a financial instrument (a thing you invest in) where you commit to paying a price today to receive something tomorrow. The price could go up or down tomorrow, but …

The test-driven astronaut

Don't Make Your Code "More Testable", make the design of your program better. Snappy test suites are all the vogue, but that misses the point of even writing tests: create a …

Simplicators for sanity

For those rainy days when integrating with a not-entirely sane system is getting you down: A Simplicator introduces a new seam into the system that did not exist when the service's …

Smelly obsessions

Get Rid of That Code Smell - Primitive Obsession: Think about it this way: would you use a string to represent a date? You could, right? Just create a string, let’s say …

How to think about organizing folders: don't.

Mountain Lion’s New File System: Folders tend to grow deeper and deeper. As soon as we have more than a handful of notions, or (beware!) more than one hierarchical level of …

A romantic comedy: OO and FP

My magic ball predicts that OO and FP are going to take something of a “romantic comedy” path of evolution. Act I. OO and FP are introduced at dinner parties and they could not …

Rediscovery: OO and FP

I’ve noticed some of the sharpest developers I know are doing one or both of these things: Rediscovering object oriented design. Practicing evolving a design, often driven by the …

Three kinds of distributed systems

Little-d distributed systems: the accidental sort. You built a program, it ran on one server. Then you added a database, some caches, perhaps a job worker somewhere. Whoops, you …

Protect that state: locks, monitors, and atomics

You need to protect a piece of data, like a counter or an output stream, from getting garbled by multiple threads. Three choices, hot shot: Explicit locks (aka mutexes): acquire a …

Future lies

It’s easy to delude yourself when writing software. Do these tests really describe what the application does? Does the documentation really describe how the system works now? Is …

Too eager to add code

I’m a little too eager to add code. If there’s a mess that needs refurbishing, rather than refactoring, I’m too quick to create a parallel world that is nice and tidy like I’d like …

Gaining traction for businesses new and old

People want to see action and progress, no matter how small. They want to hear about milestones and rave reviews. Even if you’re not adding new users and customers rapidly, you can …

"Surround yourself with beautiful software"

Building an army of robots, Kyle Kneath on GitHub's internal tools. The closing line of this deck is "Surround yourself with beautiful software". One of the most compelling things …

Etsy's rules of distributed systems

Architecting for change. Complex systems and change: Distributed systems are inherently complex. The outcome of change in complex systems is hard to predict. The outcome of small, …

Thread safety in Rails, explained!

Read up on Thread and Queue and ready for more multi-threaded Ruby reading? Aaron Patterson has written up how the thread safe option works in Rails and some tradeoffs involved in …

Getting started with Ruby Concurrency using two simple classes

Building a concurrent system isn’t as hard as they say it is. What it boils down to is, you can’t program by coincidence. Here’s a list of qualities in a strong developer: Comfort …

Chronologic, a piece of software history

It’s long past time to call Chronologic a project at it’s end-of-life. About a year ago, it went into serious use as the storage system for social timelines in Gowalla. About six …

The Grinder

As teams grow and specialize, I’ve noticed people tend to take on characters that I see over and over. Archetypes that seem to go beyond one project and apply to each team I work …

AC/DC writes robust songs

AC/DC writes songs that are fundamentally very strong. They aren’t the most touching, artistically composed songs. But they’re very solid songs. They hold together well, you can …

They can't all be winners

My Tuesdays typically look like this: write/hack for my weblog, work, lunch, work, short run, and then hack with other Austin nerds at Houndstooth Coffee. As it happens, I did OK …

The forces of change on the US legislature

As of 2012, the major forces operating on the legislation of the US government are, unscientifically speaking: 60% path dependence 20% regulatory capture 10% marginal progress 9% …

Keep your application state out of your queue

I’m going to pick on Resque here, since it’s nominally great and widely used. You’re probably using it in your application right now. Unfortunately, I need to tell you something …

Convincing yourself you’re not done

Writer’s block gets all the attention. It robs the inspired and stunts the progress of those with a deadline to beat. It’s a starting problem. At some point, I learned all the …

Tables and lambdas, a cure for smelly cases

Lots of folks consider case expressions in Ruby a code smell. I’m not ready to write them off just yet, but I know a good replacement for some uses of case when I see it. Rad …

Turns out I was wrong about RSpec subjects

I was afraid that David Chelimsky was going to take away my toys! Consider, explicit use of subject in RSpec considered a smell: The problem with this example is that the word …

Three Easy Essays on Distributed Systems

Ryan Smith is pretty good at thinking about distributed systems. Distributed systems, the systems we (sometimes unwittingly) create on a regular basis these days, are a …

Ruby anthropology with Hopper

Zach Holman is doing some interesting code anthropology on the Ruby community. Consider Aggressively Probing Ruby Projects: Hopper is a Sinatra app designed to pull down tens of …

A real coding workspace

Do you miss the ability to take a bunch of paper, books, and writing utensils and spread them out over a huge desk or table? Me too! Light Table is based on a very simple idea: we …

UserVoice's extremely detailed project workflow

Some nice people at UserVoice took the time to jot down how they manage their product. Amongst the lessons learned: Have a set amount of time per week that will be spent on bugs We …

Cowboy dependencies

So you’ve written a cool open source library. It’s at the point where it’s useful. You’re pretty excited. Even better, it seems like something that might be useful at your day job. …

A Presenter is a signal

When someone says “your view or API layer needs presenters”, it’s easy to get confused. Presenter has become wildcard jargon for a lot of different sorts of things: coordinators, …

Learn Unix the Jesse Storimer way

11 Resources for Learning Unix Programming: I tend to steer clear of the thick reference books and go instead for books that give me a look into how smart people think about …

How to approach a database-shaped problem

When it comes to caching and primary storage of an application’s data, developers are faced with a plethora of shiny tools. It’s easy to get caught up in how novel these tools are …

How I use vim splits

[vimeo www.vimeo.com/38571167 w=500&h=394] A five-minute exploration of how I use splits in vim to navigate between production or test code and how I move up and down through …

Tool agnosticism is good for you

When it comes to programming editors, frameworks, and languages, you’re likely to take one of three stances: marry, boff, or kill. There are tools that you want to use for the rest …

Rails 4, all about scaling down?

To some, Rails is getting big. It brings a lot of functionality to the table. This makes apps easier to get off the ground, especially if you aren’t an expert. But, as apps grow, …

This silver bullet has happened before and it will happen again

Today it's Node. Before it was Rails. Before it was PHP. Before it was Java. Cogs Bad: There’s a whole mindset - a modern movement - that solves things in terms of working out how …

Bootstrap, subproject, and document your way to a bigger team

Zach Holman's slides on patterns GitHub uses to scale their team Ruby Patterns from GitHub's Codebase: Your company is going to have tons of success, which means you'll have to …

Write more manpages

Every program, library, framework, and application needs documentation of some sort; this much is uncontroversial. How much documentation, what kinds of documentation, and where to …

How to make a CIA spy, and other anecdotes

And the hilariously incompetent, such as the OSS operative whose cover was so far blown that when he dropped into his favorite restaurant, the band played “Boo! Boo! I’m a Spy.” …

Own your development tools, and other cooking metaphors

Noel Rappin encourages all of us to use our development tools efficiently. If your editor or workflow aren’t working for you, get a new tool and learn to use it. I’ve been working …

Automated code goodness checking with cane

A few nights ago, I added Xavier Shay’s cane to Sifter. It was super simple, and cane runs surprisingly fast. Cane is designed to run as part of CI, but Sifter doesn’t really an …

What kind of HTTP API is that?

An API Ontology: if you were curious about what the difference between an RPC, SOAP, REST, and Hypermedia API are, but were afraid to ask. In my opinion, this is not prescription; …

On rolling one's own metrics kit

On instrumenting Rails, custom aggregators, bespoke dashboards, and reinventing the wheel; 37signals documents their own metrics infrastructure. They’re doing some cool things …

Whither code review and pairing

Jesse Storimer has great thoughts on code review and pairing. You Should be Doing Formal Code Review: Let’s face it, developers are often overly confident in their work, and …

The cost of jerks in social apps

Trolls, spammers, and people gaming social software are a giant pain in the ass. At best, they are an everyday reminder that people are sometimes jerks. At worst, they can warp the …

Hip-hop for nerds: "Otis"

(Ed. Herein, I attempt to break down a current favorite of mine, “Otis” by Jay-Z and Kanye West, in terms familiar and interesting to nerds, specifically of the nerd and/or comedy …

Make time for your projects

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 …

Stand on the shoulders of others' REST mistakes

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, …

Represent dat API

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 …

When to Class.new

In response to Why metaprogram when you can program?, an astute reader asked for an example of when you would want to use Class.new in Ruby. It’s a rarely needed method, but really …

The year of change that was 2011

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 …

Four essential topics of 2011, in charts

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 …

Making a little musical thing

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 …

Crafting lightsabers, uptime the systems, a little Clojure

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 …

A short routine for making awesome things

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. …

Quality in the inner loop

Quality in Craftsmanship: 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 …

Why metaprogram when you can program?

When I sought to learn Ruby, it was for three reasons. I’d heard of this cool thing called blocks, and that they had a lot of great use cases. I read there was this thing called …

Modern Von Neumann machines, how do they work?

Modern Microprocessors - A 90 Minute Guide!. If you didn't find a peculiar joy in computer architecture classes or the canonical tomes on the topic by Patterson and Hennessey, this …

Changing legacy code, made less painful

Rescuing Legacy Code by Extracting Pure Functions. Come across strange, pre-existing code. Decide you need to change it. Follow the pattern described herein. Apply TDD afterwards. …

Cassandra at Gowalla

Over the past year, I’ve done a lot of work making Cassandra part of Gowalla’s multi-prong database strategy. I recently spoke at Austin on Rails on this topic, doing a sort of …

Sleep is the best

Sleep deprivation is not a badge of honor: This is why I’ve always tried to get about 8 1/2 hours of sleep. That seems to be the best way for me to get access to peak mental …

Pass interference: can't live with it, can't live without it.

Bill Barnwell on revamping defensive penalties. Pass interference is tough business in the NFL. It's one of the easiest calls to get wrong on the field (besides the myriad of …

Growing a culture

I previously noted that adding people to a team is tricky, doing so quickly doubly so. A nice discussion popped up around how to do so effectively. So, to cover the other side of …

The pitfalls of growing a team

Premature Ramp-up, Martin Fowler on the perils of building up a development team too quickly: loss of code cohesion, breakdown of communication, plus the business costs of …

A food/software change metaphor

Are You Changing the Menu or the Food? Incremental change, the food metaphor edition. It's about software and startups. But food too. Think "software" when he says "food". Just …

How do you devop?

I’m a sucker for good portmanteau. “Devops” is a precise, but not particularly rewarding concatenation of “development” and “operations”. What it lacks in sonic fun, it makes up in …

The Current and Future Ruby Platform

Here we are, in the waning months of 2011. Ruby and its ecosystem are a bit of an incumbent these days. It’s a really great language for a few domains. It’s got the legs to become …

Your frienemy, the ORM

When modeling how our domain objects map to what is stored in a database, an object-relational mapper often comes into the picture. And then, the angst begins. Bad queries are …

Relentless Shipping

Relentless Quality is a great piece. We should all strive to make really fantastic stuff. But I think there’s a nuance worth observing here: Sharpen the edges, polish the surface …

The guy doing the typing makes the call

Everyone brings unique perspective to a team. Each person has learned from successes and failures. There is a spectrum of things that are highly valued and that are strongly …

How to listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring is an amazing piece of classical music. It’s one of the rare pieces that was really revolutionary in its time. But in our time, almost one …

Skip the hyperbole

Hyperbole is a tricky thing. In a joke, it works great. Its the foundation of a tall tale (TO BRASKY!). But in a conversation of ideas, it can backfire. The trick about humans is …

Practical words on mocking

Practical Mock Advice is practical: Coordinator objects like controllers are driven into existence because you need to hook two areas of your application together. In Rails …

Locking and how did I get here?

I've got a bunch of browsers tabs open. This is unusual; I try to have zero open. Except right now. I'm digging into something. I'm spreading ephemeral papers around on my epemeral …

Refactor to modules, for great good

Got a class or model that’s getting a little too fat? Refactor to Modules. I’ve done this a few times lately, and I’ve always liked the results. Easier to test, easier to …

ZeroMQ inproc implies one context

I’ve been tinkering with ZeroMQ a bit lately. Abstracting sockets like this is a great idea. However, the Ruby library, like sockets in general, is a bit light on guidance and the …

Booting your project, no longer a giant pain

So your app has a few dependencies. A database here, a queue there, maybe a cache. Running all that stuff before you start coding is a pain. Shutting it all down can prove even …

Ruby's roots in AWK

AWK-ward Ruby. One man Unix wrecking squad Ryan Tomayko reflects on aspects of Ruby that arguably grew from AWK more than Perl. Great archaeology, but also a good gateway drug to …

Humankind's genius turned upon itself

When We Tested Nuclear Bombs. An absolutely fantastic collection of photos from the nuclear test program. Beautiful to look at, terrifying to contemplate the ramifications in …

Burpess and other intense workouts

What’s the Best Exercise? But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out …

Post-hoc career advice for twenty-something Adam

No program was ever made better by one developer scoffing at another. Computer science does not move forward with condescending attitudes. Success in software isn’t the result of …

Don't complain, make things better

notes on “an empathetic plan”: Worse is when the the people doing the complaining also make software or web sites or iPhone applications themselves. As visible leaders of the web, …

Perfection isn't sustainable

Perfect vs. interesting: When an interesting person is momentarily not-interesting, I wait patiently. When a perfect organization, the boring one that's constantly using its …

Using Conway's Law for the power of good

Michael Feathers isn’t so quick to place negative connotations on Conway’s Law. Perhaps it’s not so much that organizations don’t communicate well, the traditional reading of …

Hell is other people's concurrency

The first rule of evented programming is, don’t block the event loop! Mathias Meyer’s great intro to Ruby’s EventMachine library. Non-blocking IO is so hot right now. But remember, …

Bloom, a language with time travel

Bloom, a language for disordered (whut!) distributed programming with powerful consistency analysis and concise, familiar syntax (the prototype is built on Ruby): Traditional …

The rules of the yak shave

Yak shaves. They’re great fun. Like most things, yak shaving is more fun when you have some rules to guide you away from the un-fun parts: always have a goal, know when you’re done …

Linux screenshot nostalgia

Anyone else remember uploading screenshots of their super awesome, tweaked out Linux hacker desktops? Sorry, I'm not running WindowMaker, Enlightenment, or Sawmill anymore. Besides …

The next step and the cleared canvas

Knowing the next step is a pretty good feeling. The uncertainty of where you should next place your foot is somewhere between unnerving and terrifying. But if you’ve got an idea of …

The joy of logs

Logs Are Streams, Not Files: But a better conceptual model is to treat logs as time-ordered streams: there is no beginning or end, but rather an ongoing, collated collection of …

I'm Corgi-internet famous

OCD: Obsessive Corgi Disorder, Kitty putting the moves on my man. Also on Men and their dogs. I’m corgi-internet famous! Photo by Courtney.

Noel Rappin's Advice on TDD

Testing Advice in Eleven Steps. My favorite: At any given moment, the next test has some chance of costing you time in the short term. The problem is it’s nearly impossible to tell …

Organizing and decoding problems

My favorite sort of problem involves the interactions between individuals, groups of people, and mechanical rules generated by individuals and groups. Speculating on how the rules …

Workouts make focus and discipline

It is probably obvious I have something of a crush on working out. I am proud I have reached a point where being fit is part of my lifestyle and that I see more and more results. …

Driven to drawing monsters

From my notebook: I don't recall what I was working on the time, but it seems that the interaction between many Gowalla models loading from cache via a get class method and …

Clips from unfinished pieces

On the crux of America's challenges: Part of the American experiment is answering the question, "how can we best take advantage of abundance?" Beginning with manifest destiny and …

Focus, momentum, and accomplishment

Lately, I’m a little fascinated by the interplay between focus, momentum, and accomplishment. Focus is the feeling of flow, the world around you fading away. Momentum is the …

A conversation between fictional engineers in a fictional world

A hypothetical conversation that may have occurred between two non-existent engineers working on the second Death Star in the completely fictional Star Wars universe. Engineer #1: …

Simple Ruby pleasures

I think I first discovered the joy of take and drop in my journeys through Haskell. But it appears that, since 2008 at least, we have had the pleasure of using them in Ruby too. …

The political empathy gap

The structural problems in American political discourse are legion. Polarized interests, corporate and special interests, the news/hype cycle, and pundits who serve no real …

Now witness the power of this fully functional domicile!

About a year ago, our garage door was not feeling well. It wouldn’t go down on it’s own. To close it required my loving embrace. Specifically, I had to lean against it as the door …

The ear is connected to the brain

Some measure their work in tomatoes. I measure mine in albums and songs. When it comes time to get stuff done, I match my ambitions to my energy level. Big, uncertain things when …

Four odes to Amazon Prime

twitter.com/therealad… I have a somewhat irrational “thing” for Amazon Prime. So much so that I’m a little surprised that I have such an affinity for what is in some ways simply …

Groove failure and reacquisition

Into every creator’s life, a few non-creative events must fall. Sometimes its meetings, maybe it’s a bunch of business-related emails, or a bunch of support tasks have piled up and …

A language experiment writ large

For the past year, the Java ecosystem has seen interesting evolution. Java the language continues take its place as the new safety scissors of programming, but the pieces around it …

Bundler, not as bad as they say

Of all the new moving parts in Rails 3, the one I see the most grousing over is Bundler. This is not surprising, as its a big part of how your application works and it's right up …

Language and brains, an update

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? An update on the current thinking around the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the one about language and the words therein shaping the thoughts you …

Using Rails 3.0's notification system

How to use Rails 3.0's new notification system to inject custom log events. Ever wondered what the notification/subscription stuff in Rails 3 is? Wonder no more! I just used this …

Computers should do the boring bits

Future-proofing, Uniform Access, and Masquerades: Boring work should be a cardinal sin in programming: it indicates something that the computer should be doing but isn’t.

An ode to Hashie

I was building an API wrapper this weekend. As is common when writing these sorts of things, I found myself needing something that takes semi-structured data (hashes parsed from …

Examining software principles

There are too many good things to say about the Design Principles Behind Smalltalk. A few of my favorites: Scope: The design of a language for using computers must deal with …

Making the complicated seem simple

Don Norman, Simplicity Is Not the Answer: We want devices that do a lot, but that do not confuse, do not lead to frustration. Ahah! This is not about simplicity: it is about …

Form: follow your influences

Now that I've sort of ranted about tinkering with software and how it is less important than writing, let's talk about form. I've found new energy in writing here of late. Part of …

Adam's guide to switching weblogs

Over the past few years of writing on this weblog, I can't tell you how many times I've convinced myself that now is the time to move my stuff to new software. Oh, the shiny and …

Michael Feathers on how code grows

Festering Code Bases and Budding Code Bases: Some teams produce what I call a festering code base. In a festering code base, the team changes the code primarily by adding code to …

Incremental deployment at GitHub

Over the past year, I've read a lot about how teams are deploying their software. I've known for a while that Google has the ability to roll out new code to a small percentage of …

The Cadence and Flow of Editing Programs

I figured out why my trists with other editors often end up back at TextMate. It sounds a bit like this: Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap; TAP; …

Breaking My Habits For Editing Programs

I’m a Unix guy, by upbringing. My first formative experiences in software development were on an early, Linux 1.x version of Debian. I’d used Windows, but always came back to …

A rambling, regurgitated thought on process

Elevator pitch: I’ve found that if you want to divert a productive team into an hour or two of semi-fruitless banter, ask how the team should use Git, Pivotal Tracker, and …

Rails' Next Top Model

Of all the new and reimagined code in Rails 3, ActiveModel and ActiveRelation rank amongst what I find the most interesting. I’m excited that they potentially lower the bar to …

Make More Awesome

Over the past year, I’ve been trying to create more stuff, some of which I’d hope to turn out awesome. Largely this is an ongoing sort of thing. I try things, I learn a little, I …

The art of making a useful todo list

I have a tenuous relationship with todo lists. Rather than helping me focus on getting stuff done, they usually only give me something to tinker with and feel better about having …

A Personal Journey in Editing Programs

Over the past year or so, I’ve spent a bit of time tinkering with text editors. It feels like I woke up one morning and was simply dissatisfied with what I was currently using. It …

A Brief Survey of the History of Editing Programs

Software developers spend a lot of time working with code. Over the past half-century of doing so, we’ve invented a lot of mechanisms that make that task easier and reduce the …

Who are we that make software?

We who spend all of our time in front of a computer involved in the production of software are often quick to pigeon-hole ourselves. You probably self-classify as a developer or …

Those who think with their fingers

In the past couple of years, I’ve discovered an interesting way to think about programming problems. I try to solve them while I’m away from the computer. Talking through a …

Kindly cogs in unpleasant machines

Some of the most villified companies are poorly regarded because of the way they treat their own customers. Think about people complaining about AT&T’s service in New York City or …

A quick RVM rundown

(It so happens I’m presenting this at Dallas.rb tonight. Hopefully it can also be useful to those out in internetland too.) RVM gives you three things: an easy way to use multiple …

The imperfection of our tools

I enjoy a well-crafted application. I place a high value on attention to detail, have opinions on what design elements make an application work, and try to empathize with the users …

Warning: politics

Embedded within the migraine that is American politics are some very interesting ideas. Economics, markets, ethics, freedom, equality, education, transportation, and security are …

Goodbye, gutbombs

Last March my wife and I joined a gym, started working out with a trainer, started trying to eat better, and set out to improve our health. Amazingly, we’ve stuck with it (after …

Give attribute_mapper a try

(For the impatient: skip directly to the `attribute_mapper` gem.) In the past couple months, I’ve worked on two different projects that needed something like an enumeration, but in …

Just For Fun

This year was my fourth RubyConf. I’ve always come away from RubyConf energized and inspired. But, I’ve yet to follow through on that in a way I found satisfying. I have a feeling …

Curated Awesome, the 2nd

The awesome Samson and Delilah, “Emilioooooo!”, Belushi and a skinny tie, contemplating the important stuff, The Rule of Least Power, step into the cypher, and Molly.

The Kindle's sweet spot

Given all the hubbub about Kindles, Nooks and their utility, I thought this bears repeating to a wider audience: The Kindle is great for books that are just a bag of words, but …

Testing declarative code

I’m a little conflicted about how and if one should write test code for declarative code. Let’s say I’m writing a MongoMapper document class. It might look something like this: …

Texas is its own dumb thing

Southern American English OK, here’s the deal. Wikipedia has it all wrong. Texas is not part of the South. Texas is its own unique thing. Sure we have dumbasses, but they are our …

Curated awesome, the 1st

A bumpy subway wall, loving things for their Unix-y qualities, Kurt Vonnegut looking dapper, the final movement of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony (originally his fifth), and a music video …

Chance Encounter

Another meme-ish “film” by yours truly. This time, the idea is you do something in five seconds, plus a two second intro and a one second outro. Here’s what I came up with: This is …

Dallas could get a pedestrian bridge

Trinity gift is $10 million for pedestrian bridge. Catering to pedestrians, in Dallas? Surely you jest! I’ll just sit here and quietly hope that the plans for an urban park around …

Ghostbusters then and now

What happens when you take scenes from Ghostbusters and see how New York used to look and how it looks today? Pretty awesome, actually. In two parts.

Birthing Born to Run

The birth of Born To Run. On the creation and evolution of the song and album. Great read for Bruce-o-philes.

Representing time in our programs

Time is the New Memory: The time problem is not easy to see in today's mainstream languages because there are no constructs that make time explicit. It is implicit in the system. …

Ain't talkin' 'bout the man

Here’s a fun game. “The Government”: Try something. Every time somebody complains about the evils or failings of “the government,” strike out “the government” and see what results. …

Polyglottin' your data

Polyglot persistence: I think that many of the NoSQL crowd either fail to either recognize, or to properly describe that their preferred databases don’t replace applications like …

Tons of FP fun

A programming language zoo, a week of FP heaven, rewriting PHP with Haskell and a game for kids of any age to learn the untyped lambda calculus. Did I ever mention it’s a good time …

iPod Spaceman

(With due apologies to the creators of New Math, the writers of 30 Rock and the lovely iPod people.)

Tracking your own context switches

Why I do Time Tracking At one point, I tracked every context switch during my work day. I kept a legal pad next to my mouse and I would write down the time whenever I switched …

Fred, in a nutshell

Fred in depth.

On American political insanity

Still crazy after all these years: Politicians should tone down the rhetoric. Protesters should read some history before making Hitler comparisons. Talk-show hosts should stop …

It's not NoSQL, it's post-relational

Almost five years ago, we were witness to the reinvention of web frameworks. A couple upstarts named Django and Rails appeared at almost the same time, espousing many of the same …

Blame the compiler

Remember when you first started programming? Those early days when you'd take some code out of a book or article, type it out, and then try to make it print silly things or draw …

Two cellphones

People with two cellphones worry me. (More six word stories. Also, an article as such in Wired.)

The Technology Behind Tag Better

I promised you the details on how we built Tag Better, so here we go. This is what I used to build the back-end bits. You’ll have to pester Chris or Alex to get the front-end …

Tag Better

Yesterday and today, I worked with Alex Bischoff and Chris Griego on a Rails Rumble project. In less than forty-eight hours, we set out to build a web application, using Ruby, from …

My Why Story

Chris Wanstrath: Now we can all stop obsessing about who we think he was and instead focus on who he actually was – a prolific and inspiring hacker. I met Why The Lucky Stiff for …

Fun

Cannonball Adderley: It's called "Fun". F-U-N, fun. That's something you can do, when everything is mellow. Here’s to mellow times. Seemed appropriate for a Friday.

The mystery of good art

The trick about good art is that it has some mystery, an unknown. The problem is that if you get too close to the art, you risk unraveling the mystery. If you deconstruct it, …

Testify

Two unrelated and great songs, one title. “Testify” by Parliament [youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-OZ-M2y0Ao&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&hd=1]) “Testify” by …

Working from home, better

Tips for working alone: The other thing I’m doing is bringing back my practice of writing “daily pages”… ~750 words a day to myself, that sort of help me get everything out in the …

Gird your greyscales

Logan Hicks has some really great subterranean photography going on. (Via Infrastructurist) And if you like that, you’d probably also like some Russian submarines, their interiors, …

Getting to know your bookshelf

The Book Stalker - Rands figures you out by your bookshelf: Where’s your bookshelf? It’s this awkward moment whenever I first walk into your home. Where is it? Everyone has one. It …

Free Parking Is Not Free

Free Parking Isn’t Free. Turns out those parking lots, while sometimes handy, are actually pretty gnarly, if your goal is to build a nice place to live: Throughout the 1940s and …

Kill your menubar darlings

The Menubar Challenge - everybody, clear out your menubars! It’s one of my secret productivity weapons, I highly recommend it. Also, read everything on Minimal Mac; it’s the best. …

My setup

Shawn Blanc has been cataloging sweet Mac setups. Last week, he published a description of my own creative den. If you find this sort of thing as intriguing as I do, also check out …

Balmer =~ Tarkin

Steve Ballmer: Evacuate? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances. OK, maybe that’s Grand Moff Tarkin. Either way, I’m considering this my birthday present …

Code re-use as technical debt

I have extremely mixed feelings about code re-use. I think it’s largely a red herring, never working out as well as developers would hope. After all, developers are like golfers; …

rufus-tokyo goes 1.0.0

rufus-tokyo 1.0.0 - I’ve been tinkering with Tokyo Cabinet and Tyrant lately. It’s great stuff. Grab this gem and start tinkering!

Disastersploitation

DISASTER! Crank that funk.

Differently hackish keyword arguments for Ruby

maca’s arguments - keyword arguments support for Ruby, now. Wickedly clever hack that does reflection on Ruby 1.9 and uses ParseTree for Ruby 1.8. Simpler than I thought it’d be, I …

Interviewing to seek values

Adam Wiggins, per usual, is on to something. Values: Sharing values is the most important part of effective collaboration. If you don’t have significant overlap on values between …

Infinite Jest and fanatics

Infinite Jest on patriotism, fanatics, love, attachments, and temples: ‘Your U.S.A. word for fanatic, “fanatic,” do they teach you it comes from the Latin for “temple”? It is …

Software development requires empathy

If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support: It seems so obvious: if you want to develop software that’s useful to people, you’ve got to talk with them. But …

Instapaper is wonderful

I have loved Instapaper ever since I became aware of it. It fits perfectly into my workflow. There’s tons of stuff I want to read, but not just yet. Instapaper gives you a little …

Haskell modulo excess theory

My journey through Haskell is on something of a lull, but John Wiegley’s got you covered. He’s documented his own journey learning Haskell, and it’s very accessible. John starts …

When to do test-driven development

I believe that writing code using testing[1] as a design activity yields long-term benefits that make my life easier. Though I’m a strong believer, I’ve struggled with TDD in the …

A slide in the workplace

The Red Bull headquarters in London has a slide going between floors. I want to go to there. Photo credit: Alexander K.

Super Mario motors

Too cool - Super Mario stepper motor music: …

Meaningful work

Going to meaningful work: Just like being awake is more than just having your eyes open, going to work should be more than just being at a workplace trading time for money. It …

Breaking with tradition

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 …

The joy of enigmas

...thinking about an enigma. There it is before you—smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’ — …

Poisonous people and genius programmers

Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman have done a couple great talks on probing the important social aspects of software development, especially in the open source arena. Open …

Meditations on golf

We’re just wrapping up that nice time of the year in Texas. Technically, we get two nice parts of the year: the one after "winter" and the one after SUMMER. It’s nice in that you …

Visualizing language trade-offs

Guillaume Marceau has done some excellent work crafting the data from the venerable Computer Language Benchmark Game into visualizations that quickly show the trade-offs of using …

That's the second biggest monkey head I've ever seen

A thousand times yes! The Secret of Monkey Island, revisited. My eleven-year old self is jumping with glee. Awkwardly. See also, ScummC and The Secret of Monkey Island, The Play.

How did SQL get so popular?

Many developers, especially of the younger generation, dislike relational databases and their business-partner, SQL. It is regarded by some as the new assembly language. With all …

Shippin' ain't easy

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: …

The Roots on tour

24 Hours With The Roots - The Roots are totally my new bicycle lately.

Design: it's important

Via Konigi, David Malouf: Great design in the end will give us something to relate to, to feel connected with, and to reinforce our humanity. Tapping that right balance between …

Enjoy some Wu

Ooh, baby, I like it raww… - Some Wu-Tang Clan for you. I’ve been finding Yes Yes Y’all [sic] an excellent source of music that I otherwise wouldn’t come across.

Put your objects in space

Space-based Architecture - on building and scaling your system with a tuple space, the kissing cousin of the messaging queue. I didn’t know that tuple spaces are used much in …

The non-existent tension between FP and OOP

Is the Supremacy of Object-Oriented Programming Over?: The fact is, for a lot of these applications, it’s just data. The ceremony of object wrappers doesn’t carry its weight. Just …

Personal website patterns

I was thinking about the sorts of personal sites I’ve enjoyed on the web. They roughly fall into two sorts, roughly dividing “website”-ish websites from “weblog”-ish websites. h2. …

The State on DVD, finally

It would appear that, after long last, The State DVD is forthcoming. I cannot wait. The State and Daria were probably the two best works of original programming ever on MTV. (Via …

Three sides of language geekery

Ted Leung’s notes on the JVM Language Summit, Dynamic Language Summit and Lang.NET. Great reading for those interested in what makes programming languages tick.

LOST in-joke

DUDE. Other phrases of common occurrence in LOST. (Via Heilemann.)

Your Friday Jam

Here is your Friday Jam: The De La Soul Dugout. Quite good. See also: WEFUNK radio.

A console for any Ruby project

I’ve been finding this little snippet extremely useful lately: $ irb -Ilib -rmy_library If your Ruby app or library follows the idiom of requiring all the files for your app in a …

John Mayer, closet software developer

“The idea is to run as many concurrent streams of production as we can." - Is John Mayer recording an album or bootstrapping an indie app?

More harmful than harmful

We are lucky to live in a time when 99.9% of programmers will never have a legitimate argument for using GOTO (hi kernel programmers!). But in case you’re feeling nostalgic and/or …

Elevating the art of language implementation

Suppose we can take the following statement as true: Whether you use it or not, the state of the programming craft has been elevated by many of the ideas bundled in Ruby on Rails. …

Postmodern comedy gold

The Nietzsche Family Circus - random Nietzsche quote + vintage comics = comedy gold.

When technical discussions get intense

Pro-tip: trying to unwind contentious technical discussions is a losing game. There are really multiple things going on: people discussing trade-offs in absolutes, personal …

Think

The scene in The Blues Brothers where they are recruiting Matt “Guitar” Murphy is quite possibly my favorite of the movie. From the start of “Think” to the first “Freedom!” chorus, …

The economic dashboard

What’s the state of the economy? - a stunningly brilliant visualization of where the economy has been (lagging indicators) and where it’s going (leading indicators). The …

Even the Dharma Initiative has to advertise

Vintage Dharma Initiative Ads. Very excellent.

Decoupling newspapers

My wife works for the local newspaper (thankfully, in their less layoff-prone online division). So I’ve been wondering about this whole newspaper business collapse would work out. …

Underwater volcano go boom

I think one of the first things I decided I wanted to “be” when I was a wee lad was a volcanologist. I’d still love to go to an actual volcano, preferably active. Thusly, the …

Pattern matching in Ruby with Case

Pattern matching, ala Erlang or Haskell, is a language feature near and dear to my heart. Dean Wampler has a great explanation of how to use the Omnibus Concurrency Library to play …

The power of not knowing

Christian Neukirchen: It's a programmer's biggest strength when he knows what he doesn't need to know. And gaining (experience) in not knowing isn't as easy as it sounds.

Get excited and make things

Yes.

Using Haskell for awesome

I’ve joked that Haskell is all about reading other people’s theses, but you can do practical things with it too. His quick explanation of monads is pretty good too.

Rubinius threads, for mere mortals

A no non-sense, non-academic introduction to how Rubinius’ threading is structured. Having read a few papers on VM implementation lately, this is refreshingly direct and …

This is no former-Parrot

Hey look! Parrot went 1.0. Parrot is an open source virtual machine aimed at making it easy for dynamic languages like Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby to target the same VM. I’m glad to …

On feeds: application posture

EventBox. It’s a great idea - roll all the social/distracting applications in your life into one app so you can close it when it comes time to focus. Yesterday, I decided to give …

Making the pretty docs

When you really need to generate nice technical documentation, you would be wise to walk in Assaf Arkin’s footsteps.

A few promising Ruby libraries

From the hall of promising Ruby libraries: an FFI binding to Lua, Ruby to Lua, a neat framework for building Twitter bots, TwiBot and some sugar over the Cascading library (which …

Congruous capitalism

Here’s some idealism for you: I would like to think that the future of human endeavors is congruity. There is a lot of emotional writing about rational topics. That emotion often …

Awesome yak shaves

I was sharing some nefarious plans with Dave Thomas yesterday at the DFW PragProg lunch. He later tipped me off to “tinyrb”:code.macournoyer.com/tinyrb/, which is awesome. It’s a …

On news: The Economist

At the height of the DeLay/Rove movement, I became very disenchanted with news and politics. The propaganda, the lack of reason and the generally grim outlook were causing me too …

What I'm Thinking

Last night at Cohabitat, we did some lightning talks. The prompt was “What I’m Thinking”. I decided to take a cross-section of topics I’ve been immersing myself in lately. And of …

Recreating that famous opening scene

I would do the same thing. Brought to you by Alan Francis.

Eye candy for everyone

Scaling and scale models. So much great imagery here, you’re just going to have to click the link and check it out. Sculpture not your thing? Try Round trip with Endeavor, the …

Developing fluidly

Here’s a raw idea I’m playing with in my head: Agile development is great. But, if your team doesn’t map well to it, steal ideas from agile relentlessly. You want a fluid …

Classy Web Development with Sinatra

An admission: I didn’t really do as many awesome things during the Bush administration that I would have liked to. So, now that we have a new president, I’m going to start off …

Great Nike ad

Beethoven’s Ninth and skippy video? You’ve got my attention. Nike - The Five from 13thWitness™ on Vimeo.

How you do what you does

Alex Payne has an idiomatic and wonderful way of sharing the interesting parts of his workflow through writing. Bet you can’t read just one. By far, I’ve found al3x’s Rules for …

Coolest building in downtown Dallas

Check out the rest of The Urban Fabric’s stuff, he’s done many great pictures of downtown Dallas.

Neko Case hearts dogs

Post Neko Case’s new single Neko Case donates $5 to dog rescue Done.

On news: beginnings

I first started trying to figure out the world, and especially politics, after September 11th. Before that, it was a topic of tangential concern. Afterwards, of course, it seemed …

Thor doing his thing

My wife doing the canine agility: [youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shv6LtVNpKo&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0x3a3a3a&color2=0x999999]) Go Thor!

More monads

“While we’re talking about monads”:therealadam.com/archive/2… you should read into the compelling argument that jQuery is, in fact, a DOM monad. It’ll set your mind straight. Also, …

DataMapper + Factory Girl

I’ve been toying with “Factory Girl”:www.thoughtbot.com/projects/… lately. The code I’m currently working on needs to generate lots of data before tests run and Factory Girl is …

Compare and contrast

Compare. “Suburbs built on top of military/industrial complexes”:infranetlab.org/blog/2009… - intriguing yet awful. Quirky and cute - “people re-enacting Far Side …

On Feeds: Tactics

Ask enough people what feeds they read and you will quickly hear “too many” and “I suffer from information overload.” I’ve been there too; at one time I subscribed to more than …

Monads + Ruby = crazy

Guaranteed to boil your brain: do notation in Ruby. You got your monads in my Ruby! He uses ParseTree and Ruby2Ruby to rewrite your code. In other words: heavy. I’d love to point …

Awesome people, hacker spaces, double basses, dictionary

Brian Oberkirch is a big fan of people who are doing awesome stuff on the web. Me too! I’d add to his list: Ryan Tomayko, Greg Borenstein, Garrett Dimon, _why the lucky stiff, …

Agile on a column

Justin Ouellette: When these have all been taken down it's ready to go.

On Feeds: My History

Ted Leung recently noted his “blog-aversary”:www.sauria.com/blog/2009… This reminded me that I’ve been reading feeds for 6-7 years. Shifting from reading centralized media like …

The Next Generation meets Reading Rainbow

Star Trek: The Next Generation was, for all intents and purposes, my jam. I was just the right age to enjoy it when it was on the air. Concurrently, I was the right age to watch …

Comicus

“Matt McCray’s”:www.mattmccray.com Comicus is a CMS for “web”:www.zoodotcom.com “comics”:www.lilmonstas.com/. You may know Matt better for his excellent “CMS-in-a-Rails-plugin …

Generative Van Halen

I saw this last week (really!), but it appears the “blogger embargo” was broken on Sunday, so here goes. “Microsoft Research released an app”:research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/… that …

Vast social abstractions

We are surrounded by huge institutions we can never penetrate: the City, the banking system, political and advertising conglomerates, vast entertainment empires. They've made …

Regarding the 2009 NFL playoffs

The announcers of the Pittsburgh/San Diego game went on and on about what good condition the field was in. I watched the game largely because there was snow on the ground. I wanted …

Bill Burcham does stuff

Where Bill Burcham does what he does.

I found more awesome on the web

Via Tinker It Now!, I ended up at Live Control of Open Source Animation in Animata. Therein, real-time 2.5D animation is controlled via a likeness of Mickey Mouse laden with …

Guidelines for a life well-lived

Allow me to emphasize that 1001 rules for my unborn son is the best weblog I’ve seen in a long time. I read the entirety of the archives last night and this afternoon. Though I’ve …

Close tabs and remove icons relentlessly

Matt Lyon asks, “What’s the cure for tab-itis”? I’ll share the answer with everyone. Long term, develop a severe aversion to too many tabs. Short term, burn it to the ground. If …

Heat dissipation tower

Via ffffound.

Birdland, Forgetting, Libertarianism, Hoboken

Hello, 2009! Let’s try a slightly different format. Starting it out with ““Birdland” by Weather Report”:www.youtube.com/watch can’t hurt. Shawn Blanc says “the best todo software …

Ogres and APIs

Bringing Merb’s provides/display into Rails 3: The symmetry relates to another point in API design that I've been interested in lately: progressive expansion. There should be a …

True Hip-Hop Stories

True Hip-Hop Stories: Lords of The Underground from D-Nice on Vimeo.

Whither desktop or web

Lately, I’m finding myself replacing free web-apps with desktop software or commercial web-apps. Some notes on that evolving philosophy herein… Web applications make the most sense …

Change it up

Do something new every three years: I was thinking about the three-year rule while reading about Malcolm Gladwell's observation that it takes 10,000 hours to become truly expert at …

The absurdity of X, Y, R, G and B

The Frustrating Magical Aspect - why the lucky stiff’s great take on the absurdity of the tools we use to put interesting shapes and colors on our screens. Here’s to hoping for …

The Creative Big Bang

That John Gruber, he's good with the words. From Bang: Consider the Big Bang. One moment there was nothing, except for everything condensed into a single infinitely dense point. …

People are making cool stuff

This morning I followed a link that _why shared with us, a lo-fi guitar pedal built around an Arduiono. Kyle McDonald made said pedal; he also made I Eat Beats, a drum machine …

I am going to call Ghostbusters

At the risk of rambling too much about games: DO WANT. [youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD7nw_L4W5M&hl=en&fs=1]) The Ghostbusters video game for the …

Beautifully static

Game trailers are frequently a montage of confusing montage. This trailer stands in stark contrast to the standard: …

Gentlemen's Agreements

BMW and Mercedes produce cars in direct competition. Further, everyone else in the auto industry likes to use them as benchmarks. Read a car magazine and count the superlatives …

My notes from RubyConf 2008

This year at RubyConf, I decided to go analog and take hand-written notes. (Someone did this for another conference but I can’t find the link.) I hope you find them amusing and/or …

Dallas' multitudes

The Dallas Myth, Again quotes Molly Ivins: There is a black Dallas, there is a Chicano Dallas, there is a Vietnamese Dallas, there is a gay Dallas, there is even a funky-Bohemian …

Gaming and design

Khoi Vinh’s thoughts on games and their relation to what I aspire to do on the web: ...I’m savvy enough at least to recognize that very interesting things are happening in that …

Modernism in sheds

Prefab Sheds - Modernism in Miniature. Cool looking stuff, and its promising that people are considering better use of their existing space instead of just seeking more space. Now, …

Bruce Springsteen in a nutshell

“Light Of Day”: Things can't get any worse, they gotta get better It’s the deep sadness of his songs, surrounded by undying optimism, that keeps me coming back every time.

One Velociraptor Per Child

The One Velociraptor Per Child project: The project's origins go back more than four decades to the early days of paleontology, when most dinosaurs were still the size of …

My Day, Yesterday

Made for Garrett Murray’s excellent My Day, Yesterday group.

Applying CSS

Why Programmers Suck at CSS - a great primer on how to get from mechanical knowledge of how CSS works to actually using it to make nice things.

Getting Around

In the same ilk as Garret Murray’s My Day, Yesterday pool, I propose you make a video of the essential transportation experience in your town. 90 seconds on getting from one place …

Stupid Struct Tricks

All About Struct - there’s always more to learn about @Struct@, unless you’re James Edward Gray. Useful and illuminating for all shades of Ruby developers.

Stream of curiosity

Questions going through my head right now: Why is “The Men All Pause” seven minutes long? What was the point of that “heavy breathing” break? Was it really necessary to have six …

Learn You a Haskell

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! - if you learned Ruby via The Poignant Guide, you’ll like this. Plus, Haskell does cool stuff to your brain.

Star Wars A-Z

Star Wars ABC: Neat!

Uptown Dallas

Great photo by the urban fabric:

Garrett's life, yesterday

My Day, Yesterday - a glimpse into the world of Garrett Murray. Best ninety seconds of video I’ve seen all week. If you like it and/or my style of humor, you’ll like his Qwick …

Bell curves

Rands In Repose: Horrible: You are a bell curve.

Launch the missiles!

The A-Z of Programming Languages: Haskell - a great interview with the awesome Simon Peyton-Jones on Haskell. I love his use of the “launch the missiles!” metaphor for thinking …

JBox2D equals fun

JBox2D is a port of a C++ physics engine to Java. Being Java means you can use it in Processing. Being Processing means you can use it for fun. And the demos, behold, they are fun!

Awesome desk

OneLessDesk™ by Heckler Design - want.

Mining my Git repositories

Since I started using Git, I’ve been finding myself creating tons of repositories. Anything I think might someday prove interesting or that I work on for more than a few minutes, I …

Rich Kilmer speaketh

Ruby’s Best Feature? Rich Kilmer is one of those uncanny developers who can crank out orders of magnitude more good code than your average developer. When he speaks, I always …

Awesome writing

[youtube=[www.youtube.com/watch](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky5p-L_m6BQ&hl=en&fs=1]) I want to take that video behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

You need more Lyle Lovett

Lyle Lovett is quite possibly one of Texas’ finest exports. If you’re not hip then you’re missing out. Heck, I was missing out; consider a couple of his appearances on the Johnny …

Read slightly less, practice slightly more

Chris Wanswrath, a smart and distinguished fellow, advises us to burn our news readers and just “hear it through the grapevine.” But how far can one go with that? For myself, …

Our trip to Germany in pictures

Here are four of my favorite pictures from our trip to Germany: From top to bottom we’ve got the cool elevator at BMW Welt with glass doors, an old building in Munich with rather …

Vector Prime

Vector Prime. Yeah, I’m that big of a Star Wars nerds, I read these little novels when I need a break from heavier stuff. This one isn’t as good as any in the Thrawn trilogy, but …

I Heart Complexity

Like I said, I think the market for simple applications is probably saturated and now is the time for Ruby and Rails to go up-market and tackle bigger problems. We’re well equipped …

Pretty Parallax

jParallax - a JavaScript gizmo for composing images using a parallax effect. In other words, insanely cool.

Freakonomics

Freakonomics. Its not about economics in the dry, dismal sense that I remember from college. This is more about counterintuitive turns of logic, data showing causations that no one …

RailsConf Europe, here I come

RailsConf Europe is next week. I’m so there! I’m giving a talk on complexity and how I heart it. Ruby, and Rails in particular, started out with a very strong statement against …

Guns, Germs and Steel

Guns, Germs and Steel is one of those essential books that makes more sense of the world. Specifically, it address in rational terms, how it came to be that the modern world is …

"with" for Ruby

Use with caution: That said, @with@ is discouraged in JavaScript. If you can, its better to have methods return @self@ so you can chain like so: …

Those were the droids

(via)

Last.fm's shame aggregator

Most Unwanted Scrobbles - Last.fm aggregates the tracks and artists that people don’t want the internet-at-large to know they listen to. Britney Spears appears twice in the top …

Domain Driven Design

Designing software is a tricky thing. It’s tempting to front-load it on a project. That won’t work because the start of a project is when you know the least about it. So some folks …

Interview with David Flanagan, part 2

The second part of my interview with David Flanagan is online. This time around we talk about the craft of programming in general. Its good stuff.

Io's intriguing design

I didn’t manage to touch on this in What Has Ruby Done For You Lately, but Io is a really impressive language. Mostly in the minimal number of concepts one needs to grasp in order …

Catch up with 30 Rock

OK, here’s the deal. If you’re not watching 30 Rock, you’re not watching the best show on TV. There I said it. Fortunately, you’ve got time to catch up; the show doesn’t come back …