tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-35151788933664232042024-10-06T22:10:06.806-07:00development, technology and opinionUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger77125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-20458564269189845372013-04-03T07:15:00.004-07:002013-04-03T07:15:55.105-07:00

Being a relative newbie to git I really appreciate the Atlassian's new SourceTree app. Free Easy to start Deep feature set  The last few GUI git clients I've tried attempted to mask the complexity of the git feature-set whereas with SourceTree I feel like I can actually explore that feature set. I've already begun embracing branching way more as a result of the nice

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-45654837343833501122013-02-16T02:34:00.000-08:002013-02-16T02:34:25.859-08:00

I just switched from the built-in Terminal.app on Mac OS X (which I've always liked) to iTerm2. Here's some of what I like about iTerm2 : borderless windows better scrolling and mouse support (or better defaults?) I can use my scrollwheel in vim by default and clicking on a word moves the cursor which is a nice bonus (behaves like unix)  feels faster; I was having issues with Terminal

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-18733558508353097562013-02-15T15:35:00.003-08:002013-02-15T15:35:26.320-08:00

So this week I met with someone who was very excited about working with Google Dart, a web programming language aimed at being a better JavaScript running both on the server and ultimately the client where the VM could run in browsers (only chromium for now). When Google first announced Dart in September '11 I thought "cool, too bad it will never work" and basically dismissed the project as

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-10913427219608581922013-02-14T20:59:00.000-08:002013-02-14T20:59:11.126-08:00

I "grew up" on vim, which is to say my second professional programming job 15 years ago required me to spend vast quantities of time in a terminal to a Solaris machine on which I used vi exclusively to get work done. In those two years I got relatively proficient at navigation, search and replacing, using registers, and tweaking .vimrc with custom settings and macros. I did NOT get into folding,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-61349164040106906912011-10-27T10:40:00.000-07:002011-10-27T10:40:44.440-07:00

Three weeks ago I finally decided to pay for GitHub so that I could keep some of my new projects private without giving up the beauty that is their cloud based source control. Last night I decided to try BitBucket's new FREE offering and see whether I could save myself $7/month. Literally fifteen minutes later I was deleting my private repo's on GitHub so that I could downgrade my

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-49807275005844595772011-05-27T09:45:00.000-07:002012-08-23T18:10:14.518-07:00

My memory is awful, it really is. I maintain a private personal blog which I use for capturing extremely short pieces of content that I want tagged and timestamped. Works well for those random thoughts that are maybe not suitable for sharing but which I want to capture nonetheless. Anyway, I'm looking for sometime similar to aid my memory at work and have been considering something more along

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-89805402427750822822010-10-07T21:56:00.000-07:002010-10-07T21:56:51.025-07:00

So after my post about gaeunit a few weeks ago I've since completely thrown out what I was doing there and moved to vanilla python unit tests. I ended up making this move for a few reasons.  1. I was never running my tests. GAEUnit was nice, but slow. Even when running tests in parallel I still had to go through the process of opening the browser, navigating to the right place and letting

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-71881097741291783992010-09-21T21:48:00.000-07:002010-09-21T21:48:01.535-07:00

Great article(s) on some of the management principles in the engineering group at Facebook from Yishan Wong who was at Facebook through some very interesting growth times. I found reading this to be inspirational so posting for posterity... http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/engineering-management.html

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-13249297445192734682010-09-15T22:18:00.000-07:002010-09-15T22:18:02.405-07:00

Ha! No I didn't. But starting on the premise that I had and I had already saved a bunch of cash and decided to finally become my own boss, what would I do first? For me this is hypothetical, but for my good friend who's about to make the leap out of full time employment to self employment it is very very real. And so I will live vicariously and imagine what I'd do. The Goal: build a

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-48736946268738007322010-09-14T14:20:00.000-07:002010-09-14T14:20:26.887-07:00

TLDR: External audit and review is important and can have value not easily measured Be open to investing in processes even if you think those processes are already optimal When someone asks you why you aren't better at what you do, how do you react? Is your impulse to defend yourself? Do you look for comparables? Do you start to question yourself or your team? Can you begin to break down what

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-61484128684253470982010-08-24T21:50:00.000-07:002010-08-24T21:50:52.834-07:00

New release of blogquotes is out, with the biggest change being a switch from exclusive reliance on google accounts for login to leveraging a cool service at http://www.janrain.com/ that gives me a simple way of integrating authentication from a bunch of different sources. So you no longer need to be a google user to use blogquotes!   Note that if you were previously

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-34084946761313257762010-08-20T17:50:00.000-07:002010-08-20T17:50:00.600-07:00

One of the really cool aspects of deploying to Google's cloud offering (GAE) versus the more machine oriented Microsoft Azure and Amazon EC2 approaches are that you really are only dealing with computing resources. You deploy your app not to any particular server, but to the cloud itself. Despite the very real challenges in distributing work across data centers I am still filled with visions

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-16965102599972412782010-08-09T01:15:00.000-07:002010-08-09T01:15:12.584-07:00

Didn't expect to get more released this weekend or I would have combined these posts, but another quick release of blogquotes, the following are added : - enhancement : quotes table is sortable by either "who" or "quote"  - enhancement : click to edit on any cell in the table for convenient fixes  - bugfix : missing robots.txt In the background I've also added analytics to the header

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-69328688950024858512010-08-07T13:03:00.000-07:002010-08-07T13:04:24.324-07:00

A new version of blogquotes has been published this morning. Not a lot of new features, but at least the wheels are turning again and some annoying bugs have been addressed. - bugfix: adding quotes with some types of punctuation caused page errors - bugfix: unicode characters in quotes caused errors when pulling those quotes out for includes - bugfix: hitting enter on the "who" input field

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-59453316905882062612010-06-30T00:25:00.000-07:002010-06-30T00:25:48.692-07:00

I can see it now. Homeless, slightly demented and jabbering about inane details of imaginary characters. This will be my life in six months from now after suffering through a debilitating addiction.  An addiction to the ridiculous time suck that is world of warcraft (aka world of walking). I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I have now played through the 10 day free trial (damn you free

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-40616449242337505402010-05-30T23:06:00.000-07:002010-05-30T23:06:31.004-07:00

No posts in five months! Almost exactly the same time I've been in a new position at work.  Disturbing trends, this completely predates just the last six months....  I've moved from being a team lead to being the head of our R&D group. I now have as many teams (7) as I did people to think about, and a whole new world of politics, strategy and planning. With a group of this

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-70243646712453813252009-12-14T22:59:00.000-08:002009-12-14T22:59:02.425-08:00

I am growing more and more annoyed at the Apple's and the Adobe's of the world who are constantly interrupting my work to tell me that there are updates waiting for me to install. Why do I have to manage this? Yes I know that I can go in there and tweak the settings so that I don't get annoyed... but why should I even have to do that? I would need to do that across every user account on every

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-65927739156493333242009-12-05T22:59:00.000-08:002009-12-05T22:59:19.490-08:00

One of the biggest lessons I think I've learned over the past few years is that you have to be very careful with what you make easy to do in a software system. When you are working within a preexisting system, it is very hard to work effectively outside the bounds of that system. Whether you are limited by time constraints, peer pressure, political decisions or just pure technical inertia,

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-21056944946303760512009-09-23T23:36:00.000-07:002009-09-23T23:36:09.428-07:00

LRO does it again, water on the moon! That's so cool! NASA is important people, we're laying the foundation for future generations here. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html And of course finding water is not the same as finding lakes, but imagine the potential for fuel sources and or human sustenance. Water is damn heavy, and not something we can easily take

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-42304602947164285462009-09-02T20:58:00.001-07:002009-09-02T20:58:51.038-07:00

Saw this on reddit tonight, hanselman has updates his legendary tools list for 2009. So what was going to be an evening of actual coding is slowing turning into an evening of trying out cool new tools that have made his list.  (I’m writing this blog post in windows Live Writer after seeing it in the list) But what’s an hour or two of my time compared to the time that must go into compiling

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-36243210594944067562009-09-01T23:07:00.000-07:002009-09-01T23:07:21.570-07:00

I remain a huge fan of projects like LRO, and personally still believe that the disbelievers are crackpots but I also have to admit to being a little underwhelmed by the photos listed here on NASA's site for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html Still, I'm excited "we're" (go NASA) going back, and if anything this just

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-21822288160449351682009-09-01T22:42:00.000-07:002009-09-01T22:42:38.572-07:00

I work with someone who has spent a few years working for an online poker company who shall remain nameless. This company was responsible for a poker platform that supported both their own branded poker offering as well as being an engine for other companies who would layer on their branding. My colleague played an important role in taking their fairly well built existing system from thousands of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-74669895860192440742009-09-01T21:52:00.000-07:002009-09-01T22:47:20.227-07:00

Came across this list of "anti-patterns" on wikipedia tonight. I'm tempted just to copy and paste the contents here but that would make me feel dirty. Definitely a good list though and something worth reminding ourselves of every once in a while when thinking about the systems we build. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-37028269125075939442009-08-07T21:11:00.000-07:002009-09-20T23:45:48.846-07:00

This is a great post on how myspace rose and fall and how the same thing applies to Twitter (and I'd imagine Facebook as well) Some really good thoughts. Getting popular before you have your mission can forever trap you into that identity vacuum where popularity is everything. http://codybrown.name/2009/08/06/myspace-is-to-facebook-as-twitter-is-to-______/ A good read, and the level of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3515178893366423204.post-42252963046113781142009-07-23T01:09:00.000-07:002009-09-01T22:47:11.038-07:00

Popular comp-sci essayist and lisp hacker extraordinaire Paul Graham recently posted this article on the difference between a manager's schedule and a maker's schedule. This is really inline with my own views on this issue and really sums up a big problem we have where I work with meetings being scheduled with the makers and the impact that has. We've had tons of discussions around the cost of

Unknownnoreply@blogger.com