Paul Graham, in a footnote from his essay on “How to Make Wealth”: One valuable thing you tend to get only in startups is uninterruptability. Different kinds of work have different time quanta. Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably be interrupted every fifteen minutes with little loss of productivity. But the time quantum for hacking … Continue reading Uninterruptability
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
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
