The Blog Chill

The film The Big Chill came out a bit before I was born, over 40 years ago, in 1983. The plot focuses on a group of middle-aged friends, perhaps in their late 30s and early 40s, who had attended the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor together. They reunite after 15 years, brought together by … Continue reading The Blog Chill

Dependency rejection

Sam Altman once said: “Minimize your own cognitive load from distracting things that don’t really matter. It’s hard to overstate how important this is, and how bad most are at it. Get rid of distractions in your life. Develop very strong ways to avoid letting crap pile up.” In programming, there is a technique called … Continue reading Dependency rejection

Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view

In 2009, I quit my first programming job after college to work on a startup. That startup eventually became Parse.ly. I’ve written about Parse.ly’s startup beginnings and evolution elsewhere on this blog, including: “The Startup Diet” “What One Does” “Startups: Not for the faint of heart” “Why Startups Die” “Shipping the Second System” It is … Continue reading Parse.ly, Automattic: the long view

Managing software teams: the definitive reading list

Frederick Brooks once wrote: The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. In his classic essay, “No Silver Bullet”, he also wrote about software’s “essential” complexity: The complexity of software is an essential property […] Hence, descriptions … Continue reading Managing software teams: the definitive reading list

Learning about babashka (bb), a minimalist Clojure for building CLI tools

A few years back, I wrote Clojonic: Pythonic Clojure, which compares Clojure to Python, and concluded: My exploration of Clojure so far has made me realize that the languages share surprisingly more in common than I originally thought as an outside observer. Indeed, I think Clojure may be the most “Pythonic” language running on the … Continue reading Learning about babashka (bb), a minimalist Clojure for building CLI tools

JavaScript: The Modern Parts

In the last few months, I have learned a lot about modern JavaScript and CSS development with a local toolchain powered by Node 8, Webpack 4, and Babel 7. As part of that, I am doing my second “re-introduction to JavaScript”. I first learned JS in 1998. Then relearned it from scratch in 2008, in … Continue reading JavaScript: The Modern Parts

Shipping the Second System

In 2015-2016, the Parse.ly team embarked upon the task of re-envisioning its entire backend technology stack. The goal was to build upon the learnings of more than 2 years delivering real-time web content analytics, and use that knowledge to create the foundation for a scalable stream processing system that had built-in support for fault tolerance, … Continue reading Shipping the Second System

Expanding my mind, once more, with functional programming

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a classic computer science text written by Gerald Jay Sussman and Hal Abelson. It is widely known in the computer science community as the “wizard book”. It intends to teach the foundations of computer programming from “first principles”, illustrating programming language design using Scheme, a dialect … Continue reading Expanding my mind, once more, with functional programming

Public technical talks and slides

Over the years, I’ve put together a few public technical talks where the slides are accessible on this site. These are only really nice to view on desktop, and require the use of arrow keys to move around. Long-form notes are also available — generated by a sweet Sphinx and reStructuredText plugin. I figured I’d … Continue reading Public technical talks and slides