May 2012
2 posts
Bigger monitors
“Places that value their people consider equipment expenses small compared to the productivity (and happiness) of their people.” So true. http://bit.ly/KFG5iR
May 18th
I'm at Houses of Parliament!
http://4sq.com/5yFSFK
May 15th
April 2012
10 posts
Front End Performance Case Study: GitHub
http://bit.ly/KkOvYP
Apr 30th
Cook something or get out of the kitchen
http://bit.ly/Jdmx4J
Apr 21st
You Are Probably Not a Hacker
A thought provoking post about what it means to be a _real_ hacker. In short: it’s your life, an obsession: http://bch.me/J5tU02
Apr 20th
Content focused design
“The central goal of our design is to put the content first and get out of away. For example, we recently removed the traditional top navigation bar from our web and mobile products to give more vertical space for content.” Check out the first screenshots to see how well this works: http://bit.ly/JadqTw
Apr 18th
Why Good Programmers Are Lazy and Dumb
http://bit.ly/I4rn3j
Apr 18th
Continuous deployment with Heroku
This would be great if only Heroku had rolling deploys with little impact on the end user. But it doesn’t.. Yet. http://bit.ly/IYqryc
Apr 18th
2 tags
No I won't sign your NDA, here's why.
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Apr 17th
2 tags
How Not To Sort By Average Rating
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Apr 3rd
2 tags
Global min_messages
When running Rails apps with Postgres in development mode, you might notice output like this when running tests: NOTICE: CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence "users_id_seq" for serial column "users.id" NOTICE: CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "users_pkey" for table "users" Here is the solution
Apr 3rd
2 tags
Thought this was impossible? IP address failover...
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Apr 2nd
March 2012
34 posts
2 tags
UI responsiveness: OSX vs. Windows, iOS vs....
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Mar 30th
2 tags
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for?
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Mar 30th
2 tags
Puma (Mongrel/WEBrick Alternative for Ruby by...
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Mar 30th
2 tags
Prince of Persia creator finds lost source code 23...
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Mar 30th
2 tags
Kickstarter: rails.app
Let’s make Rails on OS X easy again! [shared via Hacker News]
Mar 29th
2 tags
Want To Hook Users? Drive Them Crazy.
Note: This post originally appeared in TechCrunch Here’s the gist: Rather than using conventional feedback loops, companies today are employing a new, stronger habit-forming mechanism to hook users—the desire engine. At the heart of the desire engine is a variable schedule of rewards: a powerful hack that focuses attention, provides pleasure, and infatuates the mind. Our search for variable...
Mar 29th
2 tags
Building the worst Linux PC ever: 6 hours to boot...
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Mar 29th
2 tags
Patents Threaten To Silence A Little Girl,...
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Mar 28th
2 tags
10,000 People Sign Petition to Honor Alan Turing...
10,000 People Sign Petition to Honor Alan Turing by Putting Him on the £10 Note
Mar 27th
2 tags
The universe is big. This big.
What happens when you take a monster 4.1 meter telescope in the southern hemisphere and point it at the same patch of sky for 55 hours? This. Oh my, this: [Click to embiggen.] OK, I know. At first glance it doesn’t look like much, does it? Just a field of stars. However, here’s the important bit: I had to take the somewhat larger original image and reduce it in size to fit my 610-pixel-wide...
Mar 27th
2 tags
7 Years Of YouTube Scalability Lessons In 30...
If you started out building a dating site and instead ended up  building a video sharing site (YouTube) that handles 4 billion views a day, then it’s just possible you learned something along the way. And indeed, Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube, did learn a lot and he has given a talk about it at PyCon: Scalability at YouTube. This...
Mar 27th
2 tags
One Drug to Shrink All Tumors
Survivor. When mice with human tumors received doses of anti-CD47, which sets the immune system against tumor cells, the cancers shrank and disappeared. Credit: Fotosearch A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been...
Mar 27th
2 tags
How I went from writing 2,000 words a day to...
When I started writing The Spirit War (Eli novel #4), I had a bit of a problem. I had a brand new baby and my life (like every new mother’s life) was constantly on the verge of shambles. I paid for a sitter four times a week so I could get some writing time, and I guarded these hours like a mama bear guards her cubs - with ferocity and hiker-mauling violence. To keep my schedule and make...
Mar 26th
2 tags
Episode #257 - March 23rd, 2012
RSpec 2.9.0 released … GitHub Ruby Styleguide … technoweenie’s blog post, “Ending the Mass Assignment Party” … Life Without Gemsets … Custom Bundler Groups … Avdi Grimm’s _Objects on Rails_ Book Available Free Listen to this episode on Ruby5 This episode is sponsored by New Relic New Relic is the all-in-one web performance analytics product. It lets you manage and monitor web application...
Mar 23rd
2 tags
Man finds his way home using Google Earth - after...
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Mar 14th
2 tags
Bitcoin Brainwallet
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Mar 13th
2 tags
Short, explicit test setups
You probably know about this Factory Girl definition syntax: FactoryGirl.define do factory :user do name 'Connie Customer' end end But did you know about this Factory Girl invocation syntax? setup do @user = create(:user) end Or: setup do @user = build(:user) end Or: setup do post :create, user: attributes_for(:user) end It’s in there. Configuration for Test::Unit /...
Mar 12th
2 tags
Your product sucks... and why that's OK
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Mar 12th
2 tags
5 Graph Databases to Consider
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Mar 12th
2 tags
Hidden gems in Mac OS X
Since version 10.5 “Leopard”, Mac OS X has had DTrace, a tool used for performance analysis and troubleshooting. It provides data for Apple’s Instruments tool, as well as a collection of command line tools that are implemented as DTrace scripts. I’m familiar with the latter as I wrote the originals for the DTraceToolkit, which Apple then customized and enhanced for Mac OS X where they are...
Mar 11th
2 tags
Google celebrates the UK’s Bletchley Park and...
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Mar 9th
2 tags
Securing Your Domain Against Seizure: Where Is...
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Mar 8th
2 tags
Raspberry Pi interview: Eben Upton reveals all
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Mar 6th
2 tags
Misleading Title About Queueing
I don’t know about you, but I find it super frustrating when people blog about cool stuff at the beginning of a project, but then as it grows, they either don’t take the time to teach or they get all protective about what they are doing. I am going to do my best to continue to discuss the strategies we are using to grow Gauges. I hope you find them useful and, by all means, if you have tips or...
Mar 6th
2 tags
Sometimes the bug isn't in your code, it's in the...
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Mar 6th
2 tags
Just finish it
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Mar 4th
2 tags
Nobody Wants to Learn How to Program
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Mar 4th
2 tags
Your ideas are shit. Make them anyway.
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Mar 4th
2 tags
Pair Programming Considered Harmful?
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Mar 4th
I'm at Hotel Miramar Barcelona!
http://4sq.com/hmxqWu
Mar 3rd
2 tags
How Not To Sell Software in 2012
Though most of our stack at Simple is based on open source software, we occasionally try commercial software. Mostly, we don’t end up buying it. A big reason why is the incredibly time-consuming, aggravating sales process that most commercial enterprise (that is, non-consumer) software vendors insist on. I’m between vendor calls today and channeling my irritation into this post. It’s 2012....
Mar 2nd
2 tags
Make your website fast. (And why you should).
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Mar 1st
2 tags
Ruby Patterns from GitHub's Codebase
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Mar 1st
2 tags
Hello Heroku World - Autobenching Heroku
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Mar 1st
February 2012
25 posts
2 tags
Introducing Collusion: Discover who’s tracking you...
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Feb 29th
2 tags
The Hardest Thing About Teaching: Knowing When to...
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Feb 29th
2 tags
About normalize.css: a modern, HTML5-ready...
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Feb 29th
2 tags
We started requiring code reviews for everything,...
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Feb 29th