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
Just came across this essay I wrote on my morning commute from Long Island to NYC in 2007, while I was a software engineer for Morgan Stanley. I was joking with some friends the other day that my “to read” list keeps growing every day, and it only seems like things are added but never … Continue reading Smaller buckets and bigger thimbles
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?
Reddit is a pretty amazing site. An early “social news” startup, its founders sold it to a large media company in 2006, and rather than what usually happens in that case — the site shutting down or being subsumed by another property — it continued to grow healthily. Now, it’s probably a top-50 web property, … Continue reading Digg’ing your own grave
Wanna build a web app fast? Know a little bit about programming but want to build a modern web app using well-supported, well-documented, and universally accessible languages? You’ll love these Python, HTML/CSS, and JavaScript resources. I’ve been sharing these documents with friends who ask me, “I want to start programming and build a web app, … Continue reading Build a web app fast: Python, HTML & JavaScript resources
I read an excellent debrief on a startup’s experience with MongoDB, called “A Year with MongoDB”. It was excellent due to its level of detail. Some of its points are important — particularly global write lock and uncompressed field names, both issues that needlessly afflict large MongoDB clusters and will likely be fixed eventually. However, … Continue reading On multi-form data
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 Fred Wilson’s blog post about Raise Cache and HackNY, someone asked a very legitimate question: Why are we raising money to benefit CS students from top programs around the country? Why are we raising money to help companies like Business Insider and bit.ly hire interns? The event looks like fun but I’ve been trying … Continue reading Why NYC does, indeed, need HackNY
It’s hard to find me gushing more unapologetically than when I talk about the virtues of my favorite programming language, Python. Indeed, my life for the last 3 years has been dominated by the language. In many ways, pursuing a startup and enduring the associated financial hardship was partially because I had become frustrated with … Continue reading import this: learning the Zen of Python with code and slides
