Category: Curated

• October 16, 2017

  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 with his myriad of synthesizers and effects rack with speed. I had no idea what his hands were doing as he moved from […]
• August 5, 2014

  A Ruby hash, Luxury Touring Edition

  Wherein Ruby's hashes are made slightly nicer
• January 3, 2014

  Currently provoking my thought

  Wherein NFL announcers are quantified, a Pinterest product is made, and architecture is contemplated.
• November 19, 2013

  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 can positively enhance the world. Reminder: if you tilt your head just so, developers do a lot of design activities too.
• November 3, 2013

  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 major contributor to Plan 9 and Go The infrastructure underneath New York City, sewers, subways, the whole shebang “Alabama” by John Coltrane, a jazz […]
• October 29, 2013

  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 they can’t write any more, they go do something else. I think we need to think of our desks in the same way: […]
• October 24, 2013

  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 magical to seeing the commonplace of our world in mathematical terms.
• August 13, 2013

  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 changing goals, and overly literal state machines. Past behavior isn’t always an indication of future behavior, and humans are terrible at reasoning about complex systems. As […]
• August 13, 2013

  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 history of the industry, the players in the maze, the casualties of the past, and the technologies that are likely to move walls and change assumptions I love this idea […]
• August 12, 2013

  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. Dave Copeland makes the point that refactoring without a value-added change (feature, improvement, bug fix, optimization, etc.) is a losing proposition. By the numbers, he’s absolutely right. Further, […]