De facto immutability

Another in a series of posts wherein I spitball about things that computer scientists already know, but have only just occurred to me. ..

What Netflix bought from Comcast is a CDN

With the hubbub about net neutrality, fast lanes and Netflix, I though I would illustrate what we are dealing with technologically. ..

Middle class in NYC

There is a notion I hear from time to time that earning (say) $100,000 while living in NYC makes one “middle class”. The logic being, NYC is expensive and $100K doesn’t go as far as it would in other places. Or, that many nearby people earn similar or higher incomes, putting one “in the middle”. ..

NYC doesn’t need to be Silicon Valley

An idea for bookifying the web

I use Pocket, a handy “read it later” tool. The idea is that I can “pocket” a web page by clicking a bookmarklet (or browser extension), and the page is: ..

Web Components: have we not been here before?

Addy Osmani describes Web Components, of which an important part is custom tags. The promise: In one word, a future with Web Components is declarative. JavaScript still exists in this future, but is relegated back to a role where it acts as a glue holding the other bits of a component together. Web Apps in the near future will be composed almost entirely from elements (tags). Some of these elements (like the <audio> tag) will be given to you by the browser but others like <slide-show> will be custom elements provided by UI libraries or you can write it yourself. ..

Nesting is state

There are stylistic debates about how much nesting or indentation one should choose in code. This slide and the one that follows illustrate the issue well. The slide refers to “cognitive load” without explaining, and it occurs to me that nesting is state. ..

Ben Horowitz on wage-fixing

I am really, really enjoying Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It’s blunt and refreshing, and lives up to its title. It’s a nice counter to the notion that running a business is dreamy and life-affirming all the time. ..

What Stack Overflow and Go have in common

I’ve been working at Stack for over three years now, and over the last six months or so I’ve been doing playing with a programming language called Go. Both are highly regarded and, for many, controversial, and I’ve realized what they have in common. ..

How I optimize conversations

I had a realization some years ago in working with a person at a previous firm. After many interactions, I noticed that my productivity, my happiness, my motivation consistently were diminished after dealing with them. ..