January 2010
26 posts
“You never get to the point where you have to hammer in a nail and discover that...”
– Software Is Hard
“I believe that the following statement is an axiom of software development:
...”
– Software Is Hard
“I want you to make it so people have to give us their email before they can look...”
– (via clientsfromhell)
“While I’ve come to love Javascript, I miss the syntactic beauty of Python. The...”
– Aza’s Thoughts » Making Javascript Syntax Not Suck?
“Apes will always need to groom each other, and Twitter is great for that.”
– One on One: Anil Dash of Expert Labs - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
Anil Dash == awesome.
“Let me not to the marriage of false impressions deny impediments. I am not...”
– Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
“I still suck. There are still so many people out there who are far better than I...”
– I Have No Talent // RailsTips by John Nunemaker
Keep a mild groove on.
The Soulchild Remix of...
Metaprogramming: Ruby vs. Javascript
fingernailsinoatmeal:
I’ve recently been working more with Javascript outside of the browser, thanks mostly to node.js. To jump in and learn the language, I tried to emulate some of the metaprogramming I’d learned from working with ruby. I’m going to show examples in ruby and the equivalent code in Javascript. Let’s start by setting up some ninja objects.
This is all pretty...
They're weird and smart as balls
The Rumpus: So tell me about the engineers.
Facebook Employee: They’re weird, and smart as balls. For example, this guy right now is single-handedly rewriting, essentially, the entire site. Our site is coded, I’d say, 90% in PHP. All the front end — everything you see — is generated via a language called PHP. He is creating HPHP, Hyper-PHP, which means he’s literally rewriting the entire language. There’s this distinction in coding between a scripted language and a compiled language. PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top. But with a compiled language, the program you write is compiled into an executable file. It doesn’t have to read the program from beginning to end in order to execute commands. It’s much faster that way. So this engineer is converting the site from one that runs on a scripted language to one that runs on a compiled language. However, if you went to go talk to him about basketball, you would probably have the most awkward conversation you’d have with a human being in your entire life. You just can’t talk to these people on a normal level. If you wanted to talk about basketball, talk about graph theory. Then he’d get it. And there’s a lot of people like that. But by golly, they can do their jobs.
“Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are.”
– blog.pmarca.com: The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters
“And that, friends, is the story of an odd little single-purpose website with a...”
– Alex Payne — Sold, For Just Me
“One has to ask whether this is a fair reflection of the contemporary Australian...”
– Nowhere Near Hollywood | The Monthly
“I don’t want our young people aggregated, even by a benevolent...”
– Jaron Lanier on the Internet: World Wide Mush - WSJ.com
WatchPete Ottery did the video work for the new solo project from his friend, Marcus Teague, called Single Twin.
And it’s glorious!
Single Twin - Came Home Dead on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
DIY, Pt. II
mrgan:
Today, Andy Ihnatko, a man infinitely smarter than me, published his guesses about the Apple tablet. It’s truly great stuff, head and shoulders and torso and a bit of thigh above what you get from the nauseatingly regurgitating tech websites of 2010.
Here’s a bit where he may be right, but I hope he’s not: he argues that Apple will not get into publishing; not of books, not of...
“How the hell does one App get downloaded two million times in the space of one...”
– Kickingbear» Blog Archive » Software Sea Change
“The Web Dreamtime was only ten years ago. Context. History. A thing is born and...”
– Kickingbear» Blog Archive » Software Sea Change
“If you’re hiring well, you’re hiring people not just for this job, but for your...”
– Rands In Repose: Wanted
“Imagine the game mechanics of Stack Overflow atop a social coding platform like...”
– Alex Payne — An Unfinished Idea: Open Source Code Review As A Social Game
December 2009
47 posts
“Feature-based browser detection is a very bad practice that should be avoided at...”
– Feature detection is not browser detection | NCZOnline
“Now, we can all bitch about it being gone or we can go build something good...”
– Mule Design Studio’s Blog: The Death of Favrd 