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
This continues an article I wrote nearly three years ago, Common Criticisms of Linux, parsed and analyzed. In the three years since I wrote that original piece, Linux has grown — albeit slowly — in desktop usage. After nearly 2 years of no growth (2008-2010, lingering around 1% of market), in 2011 Linux saw a … Continue reading Cloud GNU: where are you?
One of my favorite books on cooking is Alice Waters’s “The Art of Simple Food”. In it, there is a section where she describes the necessary equipment for a kitchen that produces resoundingly good food. This is one of my favorite paragraphs from the book, because it reminds me of software and my philosophy toward … Continue reading UNIX is the kitchen of the software chef
I made one of my New Year’s resolutions for this year to teach myself Clojure in my spare time. There were a few reasons for this. First, I realized this year that I have been dabbling and/or programming for nearly a decade, with Python as my preferred language throughout that time period. Python is an … Continue reading Clojure as a mind expander
So, here’s the deal. Some startup founders at Curebit.com decided to copy a design used by 37signals’ Highrise product for their own app. They did this in a less-than-gracious way, by simply copy/pasting the code and even leaving in some hard links to the original code. The story on VentureBeat tells the full story. The … Continue reading Getting real about design inspiration
On my LinkedIn profile, I list one of my skills as “thought-driven development”. This is a little tongue-in-cheek; software engineering over the last few years has developed a lot of “XDDs,” such as test-driven development, behavior-driven development, model-driven development, etc. etc. “Thought-driven development” doesn’t actually exist, but by it, I simply mean: perhaps we should … Continue reading XDDs: stay healthily skeptical and don’t drink the kool-aid
I came across this wonderful piece of historical retelling by David Beazley, one of my favorite Pythonistas and the author of Python Essential Reference. Here is a man who conquered C++ in just about every way, but ultimately found himself trapped in its byzantine complexity, only to escape by way of Python. Swig grew a … Continue reading The C++ trap
