Incidence of compulsion

This is an encouraging story about Google exploring the ability to encrypt ‘sitting files’ in their Google Drive product. This is distinct from something like SSL, which only protects items in transit; most companies store the canonical file in the clear. ..

Epistemology and human factors: deal with ‘em

This study that Google conducted to find predictors for success in their hiring process is very interesting. Among the things that are not predictive of success: the candidate’s GPA, their ability to solve brain-teasers, and which manager did the interview. ..

OCD is id, high standards are ego

As programmers, we have a powerful tool that we deploy often: OCD. ..

A few thoughts on flat

I played with iOS7 today for a bit and discussed the flat design with a couple of Stack’ers. I also read Matt Gemmell’s review, and John Gruber’s take on flatness. ..

For want of parens in Ruby

Ruby is beautiful in many ways. The opportunities to create tight, readable code are impressive. More than other languages, it affords the opportunity to make code look like what it does. ..

Fasctimidating

Chris Baus laments that developers are rarely impressed by other developers. It’s often true. But why are developers hard to (outwardly) impress? ..

Alerts as spam

I went to a talk last night by John Allspaw at Etsy, about alerts and how they are hard to get right. ..

What if ‘source code’ were a serialized syntax tree?

At the risk of revealing my lack of a CompSci degree: what if ‘source code’ were replaced by serialized syntax trees? ..

Debugging is debugging

I use CoffeeScript here and there. And JavaScript everywhere else. Depending on the scenario, and this is a matter of taste, CoffeeScript is more elegant, readable, and usable. ..

Your phone is faster than Amtrak’s wifi

Amtrak is improving its wifi, it claims. Fine. The problem is, it’ll never be faster than your phone’s 4G connection. ..