Things I Don't Know About AGI Is a photocopier alive? I think it's pretty safe to say that it is not. However, the more I think about it, the more I realize I can't prove that humans are in fact alive.
On SQL… 10 years and a few months ago I started a new job working on a website with an extremely normalized MySQL database. Prior to this, I'd never written a query with a single
Leadership Principals Principals I try to follow whilst leading my team of software developers:Sometimes overtime is unavoidable. But if I'm working overtime, I do everything I can to make it invisible to my team:
State of the Open-Source Projects (that I contribute to) Here is a list of open-source projects I own or actively contribute to, as of February 2017. Asymmetric JWT Authentication Asymmetric JWT Authentication is a library designed to aid in stateless authentication of
Falcon 9 sticks the landing For the first time, SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of their Falcon 9 rocket last night. Elon has said in the past that while a rocket costs $60 million to build from
security Use RSA key pairs for API authentication It was a chilly morning in November when Olivia walked into her favorite coffee shop in Brooklyn and ordered a triple-shot of espresso. While waiting for the barista to make her drink, Olivia
dumbo Dumbo, a Love Story Perfectly crispy on the outside, the paper thin crust on my La Bagel Delight bagel wraps the incredibly chewy dense inside. I'm not one of those abominations that orders their bagels “scooped out.
Portland, March 2015 This past March, two of my long-time friends and co-workers married to each other. Here's the video I made documenting my trip to Portland, OR for their wedding. Photo credit goes to Kevin
browserify Lightning Talk: Browserify For the past few months, my team along with a few of the other development and dev/ops teams in our organization have been meeting once a month for about an hour of
Camping in Beaver's Bend For a while, I've been interested in videography and editing as a hobby. I love how a few minutes of video can convey the feeling of a trip in a way that an
Notes on developing with HHVM Dynamically typed, interpreted programming languages are great. They're easy for a beginner to learn since they don't have to worry about static type checking, they enable you to push updates to a single
A Failure to Delegate This week Marissa Mayer unveiled Yahoo's new logo design, ending the 18 year reign of their former logo. Reactions to the redesign have been less than ideal, but whether the logo is actually
Breakpoints and Quality Last summer the power supply on my old, first generation LCD TV started buzzing. This wasn't the first time it had done that. A few years ago, when it still belonged to my
SilverStripe 2.x Templates SilverStripe and a few other frameworks use a variant of standard HTML comments within their template engines. This enables the engine to easily strip out comments before sending the page to the client,
Purge I don't have enough time. More specifically, I've decided I don't have enough time. Everyday I get up at at 6:00AM with high hopes for the day: optimistic views on what I'll
Skyscraper of Bananas When you sit back and look at it web application development is a total disaster. If you tried to conceive of the "ideal" UI platform (or even a "good"
Good Design Is… This couch doesn't have drop shadows and an unnecessary 'loading' animation, metaphorically speaking. This article is a great description of the product of what good designers do. It's cheap to manufacture. Easily deployed
The Difference Between Online and Print I really hate that people think writing online needs to be significantly dumbed down and shorter than writing in print. Studies have shown that people are conditioned to skip around and to read
Node.js isn't a silver bullet, but it's still a bullet. If you're using Node.js, you're doing life wrong This morning, on a conference mailing list, I made some disparaging remarks about Node.js (the title of this post, in fact). A couple
Becoming Great No matter how hard some people try and find it, there is no secret to being a great programmer. The same goes for any trade, whether you're a designer, painter, writer, or carpenter.
Stop Being Comfortable Until recently, when I moved to Brooklyn, I lived in a small town on the outskirts of the Rust Belt region of the US. Despite having the cognitive bias that all humans have,
Supersaturated A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of
What I've been up to If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed that I've been fairly quiet about what I've been working on for the past several months. There's a few good reasons for this,
Switch Statements in Python {<1>} Anyone familiar with Java, C, C++, or another similar language would easily recognize this code: switch (n) { case 0: puts("You typed zero."); break; case 9: puts("You typed nine.
