I had my first drink in a hotel room in New York City. I was 19 and I had taken a year off from college. I was working for a company migrating OS2 to Windows95 and a Novell network to windows. When I first started I wrote a .bat script that could be emailed to […]
I’m an amateur painter. At least I occasionally spend nights slopping paint around a canvas in a fashion that offers a lot of style in lieu of faithful reproduction. The truth is I’ve never been very good at drawing. I can sketch a cartoon but true to life draughtsmanship has never been my wheelhouse. Over […]
One of the famously ‘hard things’ in programming is naming things – I’ve found following a few conventions in naming help you reason about a program. For example, variables should be named to describe what they are and functions for what they return. Take this function: This function is named for how it being used. […]
A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder. No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow. This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE, HANDLE […]
Are you the sort of person that never remembers to buy cards? Birthdays, Christmas, Get Well…. it just doesn’t occur to you. It’s not that you don’t love the people in your life, you’re just not the sort to express it by buying stationery. Here’s your solution: The Once A Year Card It’s a card […]
HTML5Pattern – A list of patterns that can be applied to many common form inputs To celebrate the 12th birthday of metafilter @mathowie bought the domain of the first site ever submitted: cat-scan.com Very long but good article about keyword research 6 Essential PPC Landing Page Optimizations Lessons From A Rewrite by Rebecca Murphey. I’m always impressed […]
This presentation is a comprehensive look at the ever expanding (and ever innovating) business of Amazon.com.
ThinkBack, Playing with ThinkUp’s New API The newest beta of ThinkUp adds an API to the app for the first time, allowing developers to easily build apps on top of data coming from ThinkUp. The JSON API was created by Sam Rose, a 20-year-old student from Wales and an active contributor in the ThinkUp community. His 7,000 […]
(crossposted from a post I made on reddit) In an attempt to keep the game relevant, they’ve changed a few rules to better reflect modern times. In the new version, one player is chosen at random to be the banker. That player owns all of the properties and has all of the money. The other […]
In programming, the term idempotent describes a method that can be called multiple times without changing the result. Sometimes it can be a symptom of madness or incompetence – I’ve seen code where a save() method was called repeatedly "just in case." Besides scratching the itch of the insane among us, idempotent routines are important. […]