Note: This post was written on August 17, 2017. I was living in Charlottesville, Virginia at the time; I had been based there since 2011 and would end up living there until 2019. Unfortunately, 5 days before this post was written, a tragedy happened in my town. This was my attempt to provide an alternative … Continue reading Charlottesville tech: a community that won’t be stopped by tragedy
Note from the future: this post written in November 2016. A lot has happened to Twitter (or, Twitter/X) since then. But, the fundamental analysis of Twitter’s growth dynamics outlined in this post continues to hold true even 8+ years later. Twitter is the public Internet company everyone loves to hate these days. It’s not growing. … Continue reading The Twitter growth conundrum
My first computer did not have a web browser. But I remember using my first web browser (Mosaic) with some awe. It was the late 90’s and though the web was not nearly as beautiful or functional as it is now, it worked. It was clear — even to my young self — that there … Continue reading Simple and Universal: A History of Plain Text, and Why It Matters
Data engineers should abstract their code in the most lightweight way possible to facilitate downstream integration in a large-scale data system. You want lego blocks, not puzzle pieces. The creators of the C programming language once famously said, “first make it work, then make it right, and, finally, make it fast.” This adage still applies … Continue reading Simple Lego Blocks for Big Data
I realize now that one of the hardest parts of running a successful startup is “betting” on tech stacks that, 3 years out, will have a groundswell of community support around them. It’s still shocking to me that when I chose each of the following technologies as a central part of Parse.ly, they were so … Continue reading Picking tech stacks
I wrote this to a friend five years ago, a few weeks after I had quit my job to embark on the crazy ride that has been Parse.ly’s founding story. You said to me, “I am glad that you left because you sounded unhappy there.” But you know, I wasn’t exactly unhappy. I was just … Continue reading 5 years ago, I was bored
There’s some hoopla lately about “weird” startup names in the Wall Street Journal, with specific coverage of “.ly” domains in The Atlantic Wire: The latest start-up boom has led to the creation of at least 161 companies that end in “ly,” “lee,” and “li,” which is, naming consultants tell us, 160 too many. There’s feedly, … Continue reading Parse.ly: brand hacking
PyCon US 2013 is over! It was a lot of fun — and super informative. The People For me, it was great to finally meet in person such friends and collaborators as @__get__, @nvie, @jessejiryudavis, and @japerk. It was of course a pleasure to see again such Python super-stars as @adrianholivaty, @wesmckinn, @dabeaz, @raymondh, @brandon_rhodes, … Continue reading PyCon 2013: The Debrief
Today, I am teaching a tutorial at PyCon called “Rapid Web Prototyping with Lightweight Tools.” I’ll update this post with how it went, but here are the materials people are using for the course. Video Recording Slides (web) Slides in Note Form (Github) Slides (SpeakerDeck) Code (git) Code (zip) pip requirements
Ten years ago today, I bought myself a birthday present. It was a Brenthaven Backpack. At the tender age of 18, I coveted few things. But among the web designers and programmers whose blogs I read regularly and whom I looked up to, this backpack was the ultimate in durability and functionality. It featured a … Continue reading My old backpack
